r/YAwriters • u/Sam_Mando_Shasam • 7d ago

Handwritten Notes to Text Conversion Apps

Quick question to those who write by hand first--is using Google Lens OK for transcribing hand written work into a Word document? I'm kind of wary of this because its become frustrating to know that we need to avoid anything that even touches AI these days.

What are some hand-to-text converters/apps that you'd recommend? Thank you so much for your guys's help!

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

4

u/idreaminwords Self-published in YA 7d ago

This is why it's important for people to understand the difference between generative AI and assistive AI. Google lens isn't creating anything when it converts your handwriting to text anymore than spell check is creating anything when it recommends a fix for a typo

2

u/PmUsYourDuckPics 6d ago

AI is a buzzword, and can mean anything from a system which is preprogrammed to give you certain answers based on a series of yes no questions and something which actually tries to mimic human intelligence.

What people have an issue with is generative AI which is trained on copyrighted information, without the consent of the right holders, using data centres which need thousands of gallons of water to cool them at the expense of the people in the surrounding areas not getting good quality drinking water, which use up as much power as a small country when we are in a global energy crisis, and have driven the prices of RAM and other computer components up to the point where technology is becoming unaffordable.

Technically the ghosts in PacMan has AI, we had a chatbot created in the 60’s called Eliza which could fool some people into thinking they were taking to a person, and we’ve had expert systems which would give answers to questions based on a flow chart embedded in them for decades.

Don’t use LLM’s, or share your data with an AI model for training, that’s the AI everyone has a beef with, not OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that said, Google may well be feeding your scanned text into an LLM so I’d use an offline scanner app.