A recent 2nd cousin DNA match (click here for that story) inspired me to explore German records from Bavaria. So I decided to try AI to read the handwriting and translate it. First however, I did some more work on my Norwegians.
My home page at Claude
There is more than one free AI out there, so I ran an experiment. First I submitted a not great scan to all three of the better known ones, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. This is what I found:
- Claude told me it was hard to read and only gave me a partial.
- ChatGPT made stuff up that sounded totally plausible, but did not seem to be anything like the original Norwegian.
- Gemini made an effort to translate it and did well, but organized it into bullet items.
So my new method is to upload the same document to Claude and Gemini and merge the result. One thing I like about both of them is that they remember my recent efforts in the left hand sidebars (on Gemini ask for the sidebar in settings). So far I have not used either one heavily enough to be asked to upgrade to a paid version, unlike ChatGPT which has already requested that.
Next I tried some handwritten German documents. In my opinion Gemini did the best job. Read on for how each AI performed.