After graduating this past May, I started perusing my old notebooks to figure out what to keep. However, to put it simply, my handwriting is atrocious. At times I struggle to decipher it myself. Recently, I thought: even though I can’t make sense of my chicken scratch, maybe there’s an AI tool that can? With a page of notes from a General Psychology class, I decided to investigate.
Before turning to ChatGPT, I wanted to try something specifically for turning handwriting into text. I chose Transkribus, a tool developed by the University of Innsbruck to decipher and digitize historical documents. While Transkribus requires a paid subscription, anyone can try out the tool on the homepage with an image of their choosing. I dragged-and-dropped my psychology notes into the requisite box, selected English as the writing language, and waited for the output:
While now legible, the output I got from Transkribus is not easily comprehensible. In other words, not quite what I imagined I’d written. With my words still shrouded in mystery, I wanted to see if ChatGPT(4o) would fare better – or worse – than Transkribus in deciphering my handwriting.
While constructing my prompt for ChatGPT, I chose a persona applicable to me: a student typing up course notes. I instructed Chat to transcribe the handwriting on my page of Psychology notes while acting under this persona:
Which resulted in this output:
Ultimately, the output I got from ChatGPT aligns better with my expectations of what I would have written than the output from Transkribus. Having used a free trial version of Transkribus, perhaps my test doesn’t show the true extent of the tool’s capabilities. Nevertheless, with the results I got from ChatGPT, I’m inclined to continue using it to decipher my notes.
In addition to transcribing personal documents, converting handwriting to text with ChatGPT can also be useful in a professional context. I’ve done a fair share of brainstorming with teams on whiteboards and sticky notes. While helpful when generating ideas quickly, typing everything up afterwards can be quite a tedious process. An AI tool like ChatGPT could save the person tasked with transcribing a significant amount of time.
To test if Chat can transcribe handwriting from multiple sticky notes, I found a free stock photo of sticky notes on a whiteboard. For the prompt, I gave Chat the persona of an office worker typing up their to-do list. As the sticky notes are sorted into three categories — to-do, in progress, and done – I was also curious how Chat would respond to the added challenge of keeping the transcribed tasks in their original categories:
My prompt led to this output:
From these examples, ChatGPT appears to be a versatile tool for converting handwriting – even illegible scrawl – into text. As I continue looking through my course notes, I can count on ChatGPT for answers when I must ask: wait, what did I write there?
Sophia Podolsky
