How I built it

Handwritten journals to digital

Reads photos of handwritten pages, splits them into dated entries and asks about any word it can't read. Years of notebooks become a digital journal.

Monday 3 January 1994

Work, then gym. Halfords with M.

The problem

About twelve years of handwritten journals, roughly 4,500 entries, that couldn't be searched and would take months to type in by hand.

What I built

A Mac app that reads photos of the pages, splits each page into days, works out the right date for every entry, asks about any word it can't read, and imports the checked entries into a digital journal.

How it works

1
Photograph the pages
One page per photo on a phone, a diary at a time, dragged into the app.
2
AI reads and dates every entry
Each page is split into days and transcribed. A weekday check catches wrong dates: Monday 3 January only fits certain years.
3
It asks about anything unclear
Unreadable words become a question with a best guess. The answers go into a "handwriting book", so it learns the writing and stops asking.
4
Check, then import
Each day sits next to its photo to approve or edit, then the approved entries go into the journal app.