Built for archives, museums, research teams, and businesses with collections too large, too precious, or too particular for do-it-yourself tools. Send us the scans and our team delivers accurate, searchable text in days, tailored to your documents and formatted exactly the way you need it.
How it works
1 Describe what you have: roughly how many pages, what kind of documents, the handwriting involved, and what you want back. A couple of sample images help us give you an accurate quote fast.
2 We set up a private, access-controlled Google Drive folder just for your project and you upload your scans there. If your organisation needs a different transfer channel, we can accommodate that.
3 This is the difference a managed service makes. We tune the pipeline on your sample pages first, adapting to the hands, the layout, and the era of your documents, then run the full archive and review the results before delivery.
4 You receive clean, searchable text structured the way you asked for it: Word, Excel, CSV, JSON, plain text, or a custom layout that matches how you work. Most projects are delivered within days.
Why managed processing
Self-serve tools apply the same process to every document. A managed project lets us adapt every step to your archive, which is how we deliver results that generic processing cannot match.
Every archive is different: the hands, the ink, the layouts, the era. We adjust the processing to yours specifically, which delivers measurably higher accuracy than running pages through any standard pipeline, ours included.
Need an Excel index of names and dates, a Word document per letter, structured JSON for your database, or a searchable archive that mirrors your folder structure? Tell us the output you want and that is what we deliver.
Your scans move through a private, access-controlled folder, are processed only to produce your results, and are never used to train AI models or shared with anyone.
Manual transcription of a large archive takes months and volunteer projects can take years. Most managed projects are quoted with a turnaround measured in days.
Archives & museums
Correspondence, registers, minute books, and accession records that exist only as handwriting are invisible to catalogues and researchers. We turn the whole collection into consistent, searchable text, structured to slot into your catalogue or digital collections platform, without tying up staff for a year.
Researchers & universities
Field notebooks, survey returns, diaries, and primary sources that would consume months of research-assistant time. We deliver reviewable text across the whole corpus so the project can move to analysis, with output structured for your database or corpus tools.
Businesses
Old job logs, ledgers, intake forms, and record cards hold data your business still needs. We extract it into clean spreadsheets or structured data, with fields laid out the way your systems expect.
Family archives & estates
Inherited correspondence, diaries, and journals often run to hundreds of pages in hands nobody in the family can read anymore. We turn the whole collection into searchable text you can share, print, and pass on, with the originals never leaving your possession.
FAQ
Any other questions? Get in touch and we'll answer right away.
It is a done-for-you option. Instead of uploading pages yourself, you transfer your scanned archive to us through a secure private folder and our team handles everything: tuning the processing to your documents, running the full archive, reviewing the results, and delivering the output in the format you asked for. It is built for larger or more demanding projects where accuracy and formatting matter.
Every archive is quoted individually, because the work depends on the number of pages, the difficulty of the handwriting, and the output you need. Send a short description and a couple of sample pages via the contact form and we will come back with a clear quote and expected turnaround. There is no commitment in asking.
No. We work exclusively from scans, so your originals never leave your possession. Most customers scan with a document scanner or a phone. Flat, evenly lit images at around 300 DPI give the best results, and we will tell you quickly if your sample scans need improving before we quote.
We set up a private Google Drive folder for your project, accessible only to you and us, and you upload your scans there. If your organisation requires a different transfer method, tell us what you need and we can usually accommodate it.
Turnaround is measured in days for most projects, not weeks or months. The exact timeline depends on the size of the archive and the output you need, and is confirmed in your quote before we start.
The self-serve product applies our standard processing, which is the most accurate general handwriting engine we know of. A managed project goes further: we adapt the processing to your specific documents, review the output, and format the results exactly to your specification. For a small stack of pages, self-serve is cheaper and instant. For a large, difficult, or precisely formatted project, managed processing delivers better results with none of your time.
Your files are processed only to produce your results. They are never used to train AI models and never shared with anyone. If you want your scans and working files removed after delivery, tell us and we will confirm removal.
Try it on your own documents
Send a short description and a sample page or two. We will tell you honestly what accuracy to expect, what it will cost, and how quickly we can deliver, before you commit to anything.
Honest guidance
The self-serve version of Handwriting OCR is the right tool for most people: upload your pages, get accurate text back in seconds, pay per page. If that sounds like your project, start there, it is cheaper and instant.
Managed processing exists for the projects where self-serve stops being the best answer. In our experience that happens in three situations.
The archive is large and varied. A few hundred pages spanning different writers, decades, and document types benefits from a process that adapts as the material changes. We tune on samples from each part of the collection rather than treating every page the same, and we review the output before you see it.
The output needs to fit a system, not a person. If the destination is a genealogy database, a museum catalogue, a legal review platform, or a company spreadsheet, the formatting matters as much as the accuracy. We deliver fields, filenames, and structure to your specification so the results drop straight into the tool that needs them.
Your time is the scarcest input. Plenty of our managed customers could run the pages themselves. They ask us to do it because a finished, checked, correctly formatted archive delivered in days is worth more than the hours it would take to produce it themselves.
A note on what we will not do: we do not accept physical originals, so everything starts from your scans, and we will decline a project rather than over-promise on material we cannot read well. Send a sample page with your enquiry and we will tell you what to expect before any money changes hands.
