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OCR handwritten WWII letters (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by kerbits@lemmy.ml to c/ai_@lemmy.world

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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 😊

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Well, you could try some of the established services:

They all want you to sign up but offer some free service. Try one of the letters you already have a transcription for, and see how well they fare. I don't have the slightest clue if they can read Sütterlinschrift or whatever your great-grandfather used to write in. You'd take a picture or scan, upload the file to the chatbot and add an instruction to transcribe the handwriting. And keep us posted if you do.

[–] kerbits@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Thanks, it's a good idea. I'll try uploading the original letter and the transcription, then I'll try to ask to read another letters

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Hope it works out. I'm not certain. I've seen some letters from that era and I know they can be hard to decipher. If you like, you can share a sample picture here. For us to try... But don't do it if it's too much personal information.

[–] kerbits@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Here you can find a letter. As you can see, it's pretty good quality but it's difficult to read (it's in Italian). In the next days I'll try with chatgpt and company 😊

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Well, I fed it into ChatGPT and Le Chat (Mistral). I'd say ChatGPT does a bit better. It gets a lot more words than I do. But there are quite some obvious errors. And I don't speak italian, so it's hard for me to judge and make sense of it. I'd say this still requires a lot of manual labor. But the AI transcription attempt will help massively.

Seems he's talking about his health which got better. And then the work and daily routine including times. And they're 1000 men and women in service(?) and 250 people in his barracks.

Some services I didn't try but heard are good, too: Claude (requires sign-up with telephone number, which I refuse), and Google Cloud Vision (part of the business cloud services by Google). My traditional OCR solution (tesseract) outputs gibberish. I tried that, just to make sure.

I won't post the output, since it's not usable as is. But you'll see for yourself. I'm certainly surprised by how well ChatGPT does in deciphering the words. Probably enough for an italian speaker to complete the task.

[–] kerbits@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Thank you very much for your test. I tried to load (ChatGPT) another letter and the initial part was so good that I was really surprised, but other parts of the transcription was non-sense. Anyway, as you said, it will be a good starting point at least to understand some words and sentences that can make the rest of the text more understandable

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