Turning Your Handwritten Notes Into Digital Bits

While I spend a lot of time online, there’s times when I want to write by hand - but it’s been a pain point to get these notes, thoughts, doodles, and ideas back into a long term digital solution.

Not anymore! Keep reading to find out how you can transcribe on the fly and quickly get your handwritten notes into your favorite digital tool without a ton of time and effort.

Why It Matters

I like to handwrite notes from time to time - if I’m out and about, I probably have a notebook with me or maybe it’s a scribble on a napkin.

Also, sometimes I just like to write on a notepad and not write on my phone.

I know a lot of other people that like to do the same thing, whether it’s for the love of physical journals, getting away from screens for part of the day, or for some other reason.

Merging these notes and ideas with my digital “master” file hasn’t always been easy and from time to time I would just take a picture and upload it. Not ideal.

I’ve lost some good ideas and lost some of my thoughts over time from the inability to quickly get my hand notes into digital form.

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An Easy Solution

I’ve known that AI tools have been improving all the time at Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - I’ve used Google native OCR in their Drive suite to get searchable results from uploaded notes when using my Boox Note Air 2.

Recently, I heard about the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o and decided to give it a shot on my phone since you can take pictures and upload them right there.

I did a quick test with my phone and the results were pretty amazing…as you can see below, my handwriting is not…great.

It took my messy handwriting, from a horizontal picture, and transcribed it perfectly.

From there you can just tap to copy and paste and put it where it needs to go.

For me, it was Roam, but you can easily add your notes to a daily page or wherever it needs to go in Notion, Obsidian, etc.

Give it a try!

Extra Extra

• I talked in a previous newsletter about updating my quarterly and annual reviews using AI for insights - more recently I shared how I’m using Google Forms again to help make this a smooth process in this video.

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