I just saw an AI turn my messy shop notes into a perfect parts list

Honestly, I was drowning in paper. My workbench had a pile of scribbled notes from jobs, with part numbers and sizes all over the place. Last Thursday, I took a picture of one really bad page with my phone and fed it into this new app my nephew showed me. Tbh, I thought it would just make the text clearer. But in about 10 seconds, it sorted everything. It pulled out all the pipe fittings, listed the quantities, and even spotted a wrong elbow size I'd written down. The list it made was cleaner than anything I've typed up in an hour. It felt like magic, but it's just a camera and some smart code. Has anyone else tried using AI to clean up handwritten stuff from their work?

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the_pat6mo ago

Tried something similar with my own repair tickets last month. My handwriting is awful, especially when I'm in a hurry. Used a free tool online that promised to read messy notes, and it actually got most of it right. It sorted customer names and phone numbers into a spreadsheet column for me. Saved me an entire afternoon of typing. Still had to fix a few letters it guessed wrong, but the heavy lifting was done.

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jamienguyen5mo ago

That "saved me an entire afternoon" part is so real. My buddy at his auto shop had the same win with a stack of messy work orders. The tool misread a "VIN" as "WIN" a few times, but he said it was still way faster than doing it all by hand.

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noahlane6mo ago

Sounds like a lot of work for some chicken scratch, @the_pat.

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