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I’ve been dying to try out ChatGPT’s ability to transcribe handwritten text. I have a shoe box of letters, a huge folder of phone conversation notes with relatives who are no longer with us, and a gazillion pages of notes I’ve taken while researching. It’d be nice to make sense of them to share with others.
My first attempts
Before using ChatGPT, I tried uploading a page of notes to Google Drive, then opening it in Google Docs. It can do a typed transcription from a newspaper article, for instance, so it was worth a shot. I found it wasn’t worth the effort for handwriting. It was pretty bad.
Next I tried ChatGPT. The first attempt didn’t go well as I used a poor quality scan. It resulted in a whole lot of hallucinations. Oh, there were Portuguese names and places, but they weren’t the ones in my notes.
I rescanned the page and gave ChatGPT the instructions to transcribe it as is. I didn’t want it correct my notes into proper Portuguese or what it thinks I meant. I take notes from the records as I see it, and then, make sense of it later. I wanted it to transcribe my notes as is.
Let’s see how it did
I copied and pasted the transcription into LibreOffice, then compared the two pages. The orange highlight marks where ChatGPT made mistakes.
This is a portion of the page to give you an idea of how well it did. I think it made a fairly good effort if you consider that the page is formatted and notated in my own secret way that mostly makes sense only to me.
My notes with ChatGPT’s transcription
The most off the wall error is where I wrote “may have been born elsewhere” in the middle of the entry. It didn’t know what to do with it, so it split it up. On one line it says “may have been” and then put “Venezuelan?” on the next line. Venezuela is as good a place to find a missing birth record as any other place, I guess.
I say it did a pretty good job. It probably didn’t make any more typos than if I was transcribing this myself. Less boring, too.
Last note…it was able to transcribe the whole page. Others have found limitations and sometimes only get half page transcriptions.
I will try some more when I have time. I might try my interview notes from the 1990s, though I think that might be more challenging as those are less formatted. It’d be great to have them digitized for others to read though.
Have you played with ChatGPT for genealogy? Tell us about it in the comments.
