Transcription demo (single image only)

Upload, drag-and-drop or paste an image of any historical document (including tables of data) to transcribe it to text.


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Drop an image here
or click to upload

Transcribing ...





Please note:

How does it work?

TranscribeHistory uses a two-step approach:

  • First the text on the image is recognised using a commercially available OCR service. This does a great job of picking up printed text and a so-so job with handwriting.
  • Next the OCR text and the original image are provided to Gemini for transcription into 'Markdown' format (which allows the model to present information in tables and mark parts of the text as headings, bold, italic, etc).
  • Finally the original image and the transcribed text is shown on the page.

The combination of OCR+Gemini seems to be notably more accurate than other transcription services (eg, HandwritingOCR, Pen2Txt, NanoNets, etc) and also offers an improvement on the standard output from LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini alone.