Hello, I have some letters handwritten by my great-grandfather from the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943/1944. Few of them have been transcribed by hand. They are quite a lot and really not easy to read (you can understand the situation) also if the pen trace is good and well preserved.
I am wondering if some of these new AI tools can help me transcribe them. I don’t expect an automatic transcription, but any help would be welcome 😊
What’s your level of tech savviness?
It sounds like the letters are difficult enough to read by eye, and that provides certain challenges for transcription. However, some pre-processing of the image could sharpen that text and doesn’t even require AI.
I can’t really speak for the off-the-shelf solutions available online today because I don’t really use them. They’re virtually all privacy monsters. That doesn’t mean they won’t work or meet your needs, but be aware that if you use them then your great-grandparent’s most intimate accounts would be put on some corpo computer and later used to sell something.
If you do feel comfortable with a little scripting, then I’d recommend OpenCV or similar to sharpen your images and some open source OCR library to do the transcription. I haven’t done much OCR myself, but a quick search suggests maybe Tesseract would be easy to use.
If you’re not into scripting yourself, but that sounds appealing, I’d be happy to take a crack at it. Those documents are important and worth preserving. Note that I only speak/read English though, so I might not be great at assessing the quality of the transcription.
If you don’t feel comfortable sending a stranger your grandparents’ letters then that’s completely fair and understandable. But if that’s the case then I definitely wouldn’t be using an online tool for it
Hello, thanks for your suggestion. The letters are good quality and well preserved, except for some of them. It’s not difficult to read them, but they are hand written in italic and I have some problems understanding the calligraphy in some points. I’ll try some open source library for sure, it worth a try. Thanks! :-)