Research Quickie - Using Google Gemini to Transcribe a Document

I have been awful about keeping up this blog, but I'm going to try to do better! (Don't I always say that?)

I have been creating short videos that I call, "Research Quickies" for a few years; but, I haven't been good about sharing them publicly - at least not beyond Facebook. I made one today, and it occurred to me that this blog would be a good place to start sharing them, in addition to my (rarely used) personal YouTube page. 

Those of us doing traditional genealogy research spend hours and hours pouring over old records written in 19th century and earlier handwriting. We know that, as good genealogists, we really should transcribe each of these documents before trying to analyze or work them into our research, right? But, taking the time and making the effort to actually do that is truly a tedious undertaking, one that's hard on our eyes and exhausts our brains! What if we could find a magical way to get these transcriptions done for us? Well, that's exactly what I was thinking this morning, when I realized that I might have just the tool right at my fingertips! I've recently been playing around with Google's "Gemini" tool, mostly using it to come up with wording and summaries for a few different text projects; but, what if Gemini could actually transcribe a document for me? I decided to give it a try - and here's what I found out!

I've randomly tried to do this with a couple of other AI platforms, but I didn't make a recording and I don't recall enough of the details to make a comparison in this post. Perhaps I'll come back and do that another time. (I do recall first doing this with the free version of ChatGPT, and getting much better results.)

Are you using AI to transcribe documents? If so, I invite you to share your experiences and recommendations in the comment section. 

Thanks!

Renate

Permalink for this post: https://genea-related.blogspot.com/2024/03/research-quickie-using-google-gemini-to.html