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The retired mail sorter who showed me handwriting recognition back in 2011
I worked a holiday shift at the Denver sorting plant in 2011 and got paired with a retired guy named Walt who kept a stack of zip codes in his head. He watched me squint at a smudged address for two minutes then said a machine in Japan could read it faster than either of us. I figured he was messing with me until he pulled out a printout of a neural net that guessed handwritten digits with scary accuracy. These days the same trick reads addresses on packages at my station, though it still mangles apartment numbers. Did any of you have an old timer call a tech thing years before it hit your job?
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fiona_hunt7112d ago
My buddy worked at a UPS hub around 2013 and his old supervisor kept saying the scanners would someday just know the address without anyone typing it. Everybody laughed at him because the handhelds back then were junk. Sure enough his warehouse got the camera based sorters a few years later and the guy had already retired by then.
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