I’ve been taking a lot of photography courses over the past five years or so, and have a huge pile of handwritten lecture notes that I’ve been longing to compile into an organized set of digital documents I could use for easy reference. I’ve been putting this project off since forever, because it seemed more daunting and time-consuming than I had any appetite for, and I didn’t think a good digital solution was likely in the offing. My handwriting looks tidy enough, but is hard to read (a colleague once suggested that I might as well write backwards). I’ve never had much success with the handwriting recognition built into note-taking apps, even though it’s gotten pretty good.
Then I heard an interview with History Prof. Mark Humphries on the Hard Fork podcast, during which he described Gemini 3’s astonishing facility at deciphering hard-to-read historical documents, so I thought, “Hmmm … Why not give it a try?” I scanned a couple of pages of notes, fed them to Gemini, and presto! I had a clean and very nearly perfect transcript in a few minutes. Gemini has offered to do all the organizing and compiling for me too, but that’s the part of the project I’m most looking forward to, so thanks, but no.
Now I have a new thing I can do while I’m sitting at my desk on perma-hold with customer service: feeding my notes into my scanner and getting them ready to upload to Gemini.
A note: I’m not sold on Humphries’ suggestion that Gemini’s skill at edge-case handwriting recognition is a sign of “spontaneous, abstract, symbolic reasoning.” But that’s a discussion for another day.
I recently gave Gemini a few pages of hand written To Do’s and it entered the info correctly into my Tasks list. The capitalization could have been better, but so could my writing.
Apparently Gemini and Notebook LM can also transcribe and organize tasks, etc. from audio recordings.
Wow this is really cool. Thanks for sharing. Have you tried it with any of the others such as ChatGPT or Claude? Curious to see how they compare.
Do share any additional tips about how you’re going about this. I’ve got a lot of disorganized handwritten notes all over the place. Do you think Gemini could take on the organizing and sorting too?
Loosely related but recently I tried to have ChatGPT and Claude transcribe audio I had dictated from an M4A file and they couldn’t in spite of both saying they could! I then thought to try Gemini and did a perfect, shockingly fast job!
I used to pay a subscription fee for an app that would transcribe podcasts and publicly available panel discussions that could reliably handle what’s known as “speaker diarization”—i.e., correctly identifying who’s speaking. No more. I fed a few audio files into Gemini, asked for a diarized transcripts, and cancelled my subscription to the other app the next day.
I should note that I’m using the paid version of Gemini, so it was able to transcribe hour-plus long files.
I’d done very little with any AI model until recently and have just been experimenting with Gemini using photos of handwritten notes, or screenshots of upcoming events posted on a website. I’ve not tried NotebookLM.
Gemini will add the events to my Google Calendar
or create todo’s in Google Tasks directly when I ask it to " . . . add these items to my Tasks list.
I’m using Gemini in my business standard Google Workspace account.
I agree. I seldom use ChatGPT at this point (for reasons I posted about earlier). My go to now is Claude for editing and Gemini for nearly everything else.
