We’ve got a pretty big backlog of handwritten meeting notes from our sales team that we need to get into a searchable digital format. Talking stacks of notebooks here. I’ve looked at a few OCR tools but I’m genuinely worried about accuracy — some of these reps have… let’s say “creative” handwriting. Anyone dealt with this at scale? What actually works for messy handwriting specifically?
Handwriting has always been the hard mode of OCR — that’s just the reality. Printed text is predictable; handwriting is anything but. That said, things have improved a lot in the last few years.
The traditional tools — ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat — can do handwriting recognition, but FWIW they work best when you can train them on specific handwriting styles or use templates. For a mixed bag of different people’s notes? Results get inconsistent pretty fast.
AI-based platforms handle this better in my experience. I’ve tried Lido for something similar — the machine learning approach means it’s picking up context clues rather than just matching letter shapes. So if someone’s scrawled “follow up w/ client re: Q2” in barely legible script, it can usually make sense of it because it understands what meeting notes look like, not just what individual letters look like. It adapts across different handwriting styles without needing you to set anything up per person.
One thing that makes a bigger difference than people expect — image quality. Consistent lighting, no shadows across the page, high contrast. Photographing notes on a flat surface in decent light vs. a quick phone snap at an angle — the accuracy difference is significant. I’d start by running a small test batch before you commit to processing everything, just to calibrate expectations for your specific situation.
Jumping in here because this is EXACTLY what happened to us. Spent like two months trying to make templates work and every time a vendor changed their invoice layout even slightly everything broke. Someone on our team finally just said enough and we went AI-based. That was maybe six months ago and I genuinely don’t miss the old way at all.
That’s mostly right for us too, but I’ll say ABBYY had a bit of a learning curve on the setup side — don’t go in expecting it to just work out of the box. Once we got it dialed in though, totally worth it. The no-template thing was the dealbreaker for us too, we’ve got something like 40 or 50 different vendor formats so there was just no realistic way to maintain that manually. Would recommend it but give yourself some runway for the initial config.
Hey everyone, just jumping in on this – thought I’d share a quick tip that really made a difference for me when I was trying to get a system like this going. Honestly, it’s super tempting to try and tackle everything at once, right? But in my experience, that just leads to a big mess and a lot of frustration. What I found worked best was to identify your highest-volume source – the one with the most notes, or the one you use most frequently – and really, truly focus on getting that single process working perfectly first. Seriously, iron out all the little wrinkles, make sure it’s smooth as silk, and that you’re happy with the output. Once you’ve got that down, once it’s completely perfected, then you can start slowly expanding to include your other sources. It makes the whole transition feel way less overwhelming, and honestly, you’ll learn so much from perfecting that first workflow that the rest will be a breeze.
Hey, just wanted to jump in on this one. Rossum? Yeah, it’s fantastic, honestly, it’s been a game-changer for us. But you know, it’s definitely not some magic bullet. We’ve found that even with it, we still end up needing a human eye on about 8% of the documents. Now, for most teams, that’s still a huge leap forward, and believe me, it makes a massive difference to workflow. Just don’t go into it expecting 100% automation from day one, because that’s just not realistic.