Comment by superxpro12
4 hours ago
Can you go a bit deeper on this?
If the risk of mistranslation is high, I fail to comprehend how letting AI "take a swing at it" does not reduce the translation quality?
How are they ensure no drop in translation quality?
They're doing transcription, not translation - so, turning someones pages of scrawled script into typewritten text. They have around 20 people nationwide that are able to do this. Most of them are older volunteers who aren't all that interested in computer assistance, but about a third of them have started leveraging the newer AI tools and it has accelerated their throughput significantly.
Having a 'best guess' at the lettering is really handy - in some cases the writing is really rather difficult to make out at all. Even being able to run something as simple as frequency analysis on stroke patterns would be a massive benefit.
At this point they're becoming throughput bound on the scanning process. Diaries are digitized since the archive is in one place and their transcription experts are spread out over the country.
As a profession (and under time constraints) ... Tom Scott : How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting - https://youtu.be/XxCha4Kez9c
Part of the story is that the OCR that is handling hand lettered addresses.
I also chuckled at the cursive letter recognition sheet on the side of the cube.