Apparently all that's necessary for Google (or anyone) to convert all handwritten documents to text is not OCR but human computation. What about using something like a Google Image Labeler? Instead of using random pictures, they could just use fragments of handwritten text? One could easily create software that automatically breaks handwritten text in words or sentences. Google labeler already has built in systems to validate the quality of the labels. I imagine the same sort of systems could be used to validade the effort of converting hand-written text into files. If Google, or some other company, created a web game or payed (in either money or some sort of virtual credit to be used on the net) I am sure people would be willing to spend their time playing/converting the handwritten text to files. As long as enough people decided to play, converting a huge amount of documents into text files wouldn't take long...
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Apparently all that's necessary for Google (or anyone) to convert all handwritten documents to text is not OCR but human computation. What about using something like a Google Image Labeler? Instead of using random pictures, they could just use fragments of handwritten text? One could easily create software that automatically breaks handwritten text in words or sentences. Google labeler already has built in systems to validate the quality of the labels. I imagine the same sort of systems could be used to validade the effort of converting hand-written text into files. If Google, or some other company, created a web game or payed (in either money or some sort of virtual credit to be used on the net) I am sure people would be willing to spend their time playing/converting the handwritten text to files. As long as enough people decided to play, converting a huge amount of documents into text files wouldn't take long...