Transcriptions: efficiency vs. deciphering

Beta Testing Transcription Performance
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Leo seems to work very well with clear handwriting. As soon as things get messy, the quality of the transcriptions goes down considerably. This is understandable, but I was hoping that Leo might be able to help me decipher texts that I have trouble with. At the moment it seems mostly good at saving me time and labor in transcribing documents that don’t present serious difficulties. (And that is enough to make it a fantastic tool!) But I hope that in the future, it will get better at helping to decipher difficult writing, perhaps with some interactive features.

For example, it would be great if one could select a difficult word or passage in an image and ask Leo to give various possible transcriptions. It would be even better if you could tell Leo what you think some of the letters are (perhaps the first and last letter of a word) and Leo would help you figure out the rest. In addition to being a terrific tool for users, I imagine this would be great training for Leo.

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I love the idea of providing several possible transcriptions of an especially unclear word. When I’m transcribing documents on my own, I’ll put an asterisk noting different possible interpretations. Leo just barrels forward with its interpretation of a word even if it doesn’t make sense contextually. I imagine this will improve in the future, but some kind of interactive feature noting when the transcript is at a lesser level of confidence would be really helpful.

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Absolutely, we’re planning on improving transcription accuracy in a number of ways, including the retry option which adds randomness that you mention, as I mentioned in my reply to your topic here. We’re also planning on introducing confidence metrics for transcripts, which is a suggestion that has come up a lot.

I’m hopeful that before too long Leo’s transcription accuracy will be sufficiently high to be able to tackle your more challenging cases :slight_smile:

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