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Ask HN: A non-OCR service to create digital copy of hand written notes?

6 points by softical ↗ HN
I am looking for a service where I can send (text ideally) a picture of a page out of my physical notebook and a human will organize and type them for me in Notion, Google Doc, etc. When I search for something like this all I can find is OCR tech or digital note taking solutions. I don't want to use upwork etc. because of the variability in the load. One week I may need 10 pages next I may only need 1.

I know this is an old school problem but I have tried digital note taking and it just doesn't work for me.

8 comments

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vhodges
Mechanical Turk (is that still a thing?) or fiverr maybe. Virtual Assistant is maybe the thing to Google for.

Do you know about the remarkable2? (I don't own one but I am very intrigued)

softical
Mechanical Turk and fivver could certainly get the job done. I would be willing to pay for a service where all of the coordination was abstracted away and I could input: picture output: typed document.

Remarkable2 looks very cool but the thing I am trying to solve for is the ability to search and have formatted text, which I am not sure if that solves.

anon2020dot00
Hand-writing to Text OCR is still low accuracy and so maybe in a couple of years that will be better.

The most digital option would probably be the Ink-to-Text feature of MS OneNote or with a Boox tablet there is an option to input Handwritten words which will then be translated to formatted word, similar to Google Handwriting input android app.

soueuls
You just hire a virtual assistant on upwork or somewhere else. You take an hour or two explaining what you need, which tool they need to use, what’s the output format, template, etc.

It will likely take a few days where you will need to answer questions, handle edge cases before your virtual assistant is up to the speed.

And that’s about it. Anytime you want your notes to be transcribed, you just send it through email or whatever

anon2020dot00
I live in a developing country which is English-speaking so I can probably find someone to do it affordably and with quality.

Email me if interested, my email address is at my profile.

taxcoder
What about a smart pen? I believe some will digitize the text you write.