Comment by comrade1234
8 days ago
My wife had dozens, well probably over 100, handwritten recipes from a dead relative. They were pretty difficult to read. I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed.
Most of the work was done by one person - i think she was a woman in the Midwest, it's been like 15-years so the details are hazy. A few recipes were transcribed by people overseas but they didn't stick at it. I had to reject only one transcription.
I used mturk in some work projects too but those were boring and maybe also a little unethical (basically paying people 0.50 to give us all of their Facebook graph data, for example.)
Do you think ChatGPT could do the same work now? It would be interesting to try it.
I used Gemini to decode and transcribe an old (and well known) cursive hand written mail. I couldn't read it at all. It managed to do this in a few seconds. I am not sure if it used an already available transcription or not. However if not, it was amazing work.
Almost 2 years ago I did this with ChatGPT. It was soon after you could feed it images as input IIRC. It worked very well. I settled on AWS Textract + ChatGPT to save money and was able to get it to well under 1 cent to take an image and turn it into a recipe you could export to Paprika (and others). I never pursued it further but it was a fun little side project.
At this point I don’t think I’d do the Textract step since LLMs have gotten way better and cheaper. Also you lose some info/context when the model only gets the post-OCR data.