Stop Typing: How AI Can Read Your Grandma's Handwriting

The biggest barrier to creating a family cookbook isn't the cooking—it's the typing. Transcribing hundreds of recipes is tedious, boring work. And when you're dealing with vintage recipe cards, it's even harder. Cursive handwriting, shorthand notes ("add butter til looks right"), and kitchen stains make standard scanners fail.

Beyond Standard OCR

Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) struggles with handwriting. It expects clean, printed text. But modern AI, like the engine powering KeepTheDish, works differently. It doesn't just look at shapes; it understands context.

It Understands "Cook-Speak"

If a smudge obscures the word "flour," the AI sees "2 cups of [smudge]" and infers that it's likely flour, not "flower" or "floor." It knows that "tsp" means teaspoon. It recognizes that the list at the top is ingredients and the paragraphs below are instructions. This context-aware reading saves you hours of correcting typos.

Preserving the Original

While the AI extracts the text for easy searching and resizing, it's vital to keep the original image too. Seeing your grandmother's loop-de-loop "L" in "Love" at the bottom of the card is part of the recipe's soul. KeepTheDish saves both: the clean, editable text and the high-res image of the original card side-by-side.