alt Hacker NewsGave it a birth registry from a Portuguese locality from 1755 which my dad and I often decipher to figure out geneology and it did a terrible job.
Regular Gemini Thinking can actually get 70-80% of the documents correct except lots of mistakes on given names. Chatgpt maybe understands like 50-60%.
This Mistral model butchered the whole text, literally not a word was usable. To the point I think I'm doing something wrong.
The test document: https://files.fm/u/3hduyg65a5
Replies
zzleeper • last Friday at 9:57 PM
Oh god, I'm sure I wouldn't come close to 50%; that's so hard to read
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amelius • last Friday at 11:53 PM
Forgivable, as that's a quite atypical document, I'd say.
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CamperBob2 • yesterday at 1:44 AM
Quick tip: when you digitize a page, put a sheet of black paper behind it. That keeps the ink on the other side from bleeding through.
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Just gave it a shot with Grok 4.1 thinking - do you have the ground truth translation to compare? I've tried 4 different times, with slight tweaks adding information from your description, and it's given me a range of interpretations. It'd be nice to see if any of them got close - a couple were more like pulpy telenovela plots, lol.
The model might need tuning in order to be effective - this is normal for releases of image mode models, and after a couple days, there will be properly set up endpoints to test from, so it might be much better than you think. Or it could be really bad with turn of the 19th century portugese cursive.