Probably I gave up on this too early after ChatGPT just made everything up! But looking at the process described here - and no doubt, it is fascinating - I ask myself if it is worth all the trouble "teaching" AI to decipher stuff instead of just doing it yourself. I can see the point for long documents, but for shorter ones with varying handwriting it seems too much work. Having said that, I might have a go with using AI to decipher my husband's father's letters that are all written in Sütterlin.
Using AI for my Memoir project was a process I put in place after I had done the transcription myself. What Claude did was to transcribe and provide some observations that gave me new questions to follow up on! I have another much bigger project - transcribing the pages of a WW1 diary of a soldier - I am eager to give Claude a crack at this!
I used Claude to transcribe the rest of my Uncle Bills memoir with flair! Just the text! Now I just need to take a screen shot of his drawings to complete the project!
I found it varied day by day giving different answers each day. I thought a comment I heard, made perhaps in one of the RootsTech talks, perhaps even in one of your posts ..., very useful.
Unlike a spreadsheet or other application where the answers are consistent given the same parameters, the answers can vary each time you question a LLM even with the same input.
Probably I gave up on this too early after ChatGPT just made everything up! But looking at the process described here - and no doubt, it is fascinating - I ask myself if it is worth all the trouble "teaching" AI to decipher stuff instead of just doing it yourself. I can see the point for long documents, but for shorter ones with varying handwriting it seems too much work. Having said that, I might have a go with using AI to decipher my husband's father's letters that are all written in Sütterlin.
Using AI for my Memoir project was a process I put in place after I had done the transcription myself. What Claude did was to transcribe and provide some observations that gave me new questions to follow up on! I have another much bigger project - transcribing the pages of a WW1 diary of a soldier - I am eager to give Claude a crack at this!
To me, the transcribing of documents is one of the best uses of AI. I tried it with a will recently and was quite pleased with the result.
I used Claude to transcribe the rest of my Uncle Bills memoir with flair! Just the text! Now I just need to take a screen shot of his drawings to complete the project!
I did try ChatGPT with some assistance on handwriting and had conversations with it to refine the result for accuracy. It was mostly helpful.
I am less enchanted with ChatGPT in this task today, but maybe it will improve tomorrow!
I found it varied day by day giving different answers each day. I thought a comment I heard, made perhaps in one of the RootsTech talks, perhaps even in one of your posts ..., very useful.
Unlike a spreadsheet or other application where the answers are consistent given the same parameters, the answers can vary each time you question a LLM even with the same input.