MyHeritage Scribe AI and FamilyLore
MyHeritage announced Scribe AI for historical document transcription in March 2026. FamilyLore is dedicated to historical family documents: it transcribes Kurrent, Sütterlin, and Russian cursive, marks uncertain words, translates into English, and publishes its measured accuracy on the scripts it measures.
Your first three pages need no account and no card.
A shelf letter read with word-level doubt marks
A dotted underline marks a word FamilyLore was unsure of; [?] is its own note on a doubtful reading.
V. K. Arsenyev to A. M. Ivanov · 20 Jul / 2 Aug 1910
- Глубокоуважаемый
- Александръ Михайловичъ!
- Не знаю, найду ли я извиненія въ глазахъ
- Юліи Александровны и въ Вашихъ за свое
- долгое молчаніе. Не объясните это худо,
- ради Бога! Одно изъ лучшихъ воспоминаній
Also on the shelf: Johann Kilian’s 1858 letter in German Kurrent
How well it reads, measured
| Script | Pages | Characters read correctly | Names, dates and numbers right | Misread words it marked | Last run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russian and Ukrainian7 pages · 3 Nov 2026 | 7 | 86%Characters read correctly | 69%Names, dates and numbers right | 80%Misread words it marked | 3 Nov 2026 |
| Kurrent and Sütterlin15 pages · 3 Nov 2026 | 15 | 83%Characters read correctly | 75%Names, dates and numbers right | 85%Misread words it marked | 3 Nov 2026 |
FamilyLore tests its models against published manual transcriptions and reports accuracy by script. How well FamilyLore reads
Questions
- Can’t ChatGPT do this?
- A general chatbot can read some Russian and German handwriting, sometimes well, but it usually hands you clean text with no sign of which words it guessed, and its makers publish no figures for these scripts; FamilyLore marks the words it is unsure of and publishes how often it reads correctly, in the table above.
- How does FamilyLore compare with MyHeritage Scribe AI?
- MyHeritage announced Scribe AI for historical family documents in March 2026. FamilyLore provides word-by-word doubt marks, publishes its character error rates openly in the benchmark table above, and lets you read a page a day with no subscription required.
- What if it reads a word wrong?
- Tap a word to see the other readings FamilyLore weighed, and correct it if you know better. The translation is redone from your correction. Most misread words carry a mark, but not every one, so a name or a date that matters is worth checking against the photo.
- Who sees my pages?
- Only you. A page becomes public only if you share it, and then only to people who have the link. Deleting your account deletes the photos you uploaded.
What FamilyLore doesn’t read well yet
- Direct integration with family tree platforms. FamilyLore exports text, Word documents, and PDFs.
- Church books and registers in columns. These are not measured yet.
- Faded handwriting (measured on only a few pages so far) and multi-page spreads.
From photo to text in three steps
Take a photo of the page
Lay the sheet flat, in daylight and without flash. A phone photo of the whole page is enough.
Upload it
“German (Kurrent)” is already chosen. If you know roughly when it was written, pick the era.
Read it
You get the page as it was written, in modern spelling, and in English. Correct a word you know better yourself.
Rather read it yourself?