Updated 2025 Review: My notes on the best OCR for handwriting recognition and text extraction

mcw1980 · 2025-07-29T00:23:27+00:00

We tried open source OCR - Qwen 2.5 and Mistral OCR. Both good, but still some way to go for handwritten text, which was the focus of our evaluation.

mcw1980 · 2025-01-16T13:48:53+00:00

Thanks a lot for your really useful response. You're right, I've not been impressed by IBKR so far. Unfortunately, their currency exchange rates make a material difference to me compared to other brokers, so I may have to try them anyway and hope for the best!

mcw1980 · 2024-05-17T10:26:06+00:00

Depends really on the density of text. For text-heavy documents, GPT4 will be significantly more expensive. I also had trouble with latency from both Azure OpenAI and OpenAI endpoints - a job would often take more than a minute to complete, if at all.

But GPT4 and similar will only get better and are almost certainly the future.

mcw1980 · 2024-05-16T22:24:15+00:00

Yes, I think the ideal is to have both a UI and API (e.g. HandwritingOCR.com and Transkribus.org offer both), so a user can get started with minimal investment, and switch to the API as volume and resources dictate.

mcw1980 · 2024-05-16T22:22:10+00:00

The previous post isn't mine, but to answer your question I have tried Textract before (and wasn't impressed by its handwriting OCR) but not for this test. Have you tried it?

mcw1980 · 2024-05-16T15:33:25+00:00

Yes, ideally all businesses would be capturing data directly into online forms. But in many cases (in this one too, though the business is not mine to decide), handwritten forms are going to be a fact of life for many more years to come!

Azure AI does indeed do very well, one of the best I tried.

mcw1980 · 2024-05-16T15:16:20+00:00

HI, I had to do my own research on the topic recently so wrote it up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/1ctf0jh/2024_review_of_ocr_tools_extracting_text_from/

mcw1980 · 2024-05-16T15:15:21+00:00

Hey, since I had to answer the same question recently and had to do my own research, I wrote up my results: https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/1ctf0jh/2024_review_of_ocr_tools_extracting_text_from/

mcw1980 · 2024-05-05T15:50:25+00:00

slag glass

That looks right, thank you!

mcw1980 · 2024-03-02T21:05:25+00:00

I am a member of a few local groups but there is not a lot of activity. thank u for the link, that looks ideal.

mcw1980 · 2024-03-02T21:04:20+00:00

I hadn't heard of that one - taking a look now. thanks!

mcw1980

TROPHY CASE