mlaskin

Launching Reflection. Our team pioneered major advances in RL and LLMs, including AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and Gemini. We're building superintelligent autonomous systems. Starting with autonomous coding.

We believe that solving autonomous coding will enable superintelligence more broadly.

Thank you! That's a great suggestion

Definitely thanks for asking!

Traditional OCRs are good at transcribing typed notes (e.g. pdfs) to editable docs, but do poorly with handwriting. The best OCRs I've seen can make a handwritten note searchable (e.g. Evernote) but still don't transcribe it editable form.

A lot of academic work on transcribing images of handwritten notes into text has surfaced over the last couple of years (mostly regarding using neural networks), and we decided to apply it

Fair point :)

Thanks!

I was at LensCrafters the other day and had to fill out a paper form that someone input into a computer by hand, so definitely see the need there.

Our goal is to get a high enough accuracy for handwriting OCR to work in enterprise settings. 90% may be good for consumers, but I wouldn't want to put anyone's health on the line due to a transcription error

We'll do our best ;)

Thanks Brad! It was a great call out and something we should've seen before posting. Appreciate the feedback

Hey! We wanted to show how the product works if notes are delivered instantly - vs. the current 10-30 sec lag time we experience between note being snapped, and the transcribed copy you receive.

Definitely didn’t mean for it to put a damper on the tech - sorry for the mistake.

thanks for the question!

It handles that kind of script pretty well, mainly because we had a good amount of training examples from college student handwriting

Thank you for the question!

Currently, it's a combination of the two, mainly because people often take notes hastily so word-based recognition coupled with spell check allow you to fix things on the fly. However, this also results in bizarre outputs sometimes so we're still figuring out what an optimal output looks like.

Thanks for commenting!

Adding digital handwriting support is a great idea. I actually think other companies do it pretty well, which is why we didn't go down that route. The reason is that they use a different type of algorithm that learns, in part, from the handwriting velocity, and gives you edit access on the go, which is not possible if you've taken the notes in a normal notebook.

We decided to start with plain notebook text mainly because it seemed like no one else had solved this problem to our satisfaction yet.

Good call out, we'll edit the video description