At RootsTech, someone I spoke with mentioned choosing a theme ahead of time to help narrow down classes and Expo hall experiences — what a great idea! Her focus was DNA and AI. Looking back, mine was clearly AI Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tools, which happened to be the topic of the class I taught in person and the common thread running through all the booths I visited. (Last year, in 2025, I taught about this topic and it was recorded here: AI-Powered Transcription of Handwritten Documents: Tools and Techniques).
It’s fascinating to see the advances made in this area over the past 1-2 years! I added several new tools to my talk for 2026. You can get the handout here: AI Powered Transcription of Handwritten Documents: What’s New in 2026. After the handout was submitted, I discovered several more tools (some featured below). We incorporated some of the best ones in to the second edition of Research Like a Pro with AI, published last Monday.
Of the HTR booths I visited in the Expo Hall, Leo, Old Handwriting, and Transkribus were built specifically for HTR. Kindex, Goldie May, and MyHeritage are larger companies that include HTR as one of their features. In the list below, I’ve linked the company/tool to their RootsTech Expo hall pages below so you can check out their virtual booths.
Virtual Booth Description: Search Every Word, whether written or spoken—instantly! Learn about our new Auto-Indexing Service, which conducts instant Handwriting Recognition (HWR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Speech-to-Text (STT), and Image Captioning. Also, ask about our Granite mountain backup solution!
I found Kindex to have highly accurate transcriptions. It also has the side-by-side editor to help with corrections. Go to their website here: https://kindex.org.
Virtual Booth Description: Decipher your archive with Leo, the state-of-the-art AI for handwriting recognition. Leo instantly transcribes difficult historical manuscripts—preserving formatting, marginalia, and tables—with no training required. Our all-in-one platform organizes documents into a searchable digital library where you can compare AI models, translate text, and extract named entities. From generating summaries to modernizing scripts, Leo transforms unwieldy historical sources into structured, searchable, and contextualized insights at the click of a button.
Leo has highly accurate transcriptions and handles older secretary hand well. It also has the side-by-side editor to help with corrections. The AI is based on a language model so you may some minor hallucinations – but it has ben fine tuned to historical texts to handle marginalia, strikethroughs, superscripts, abbreviations, and so forth. https://www.tryleo.ai/.
Virtual Booth Description: Transkribus enables you to automatically recognise text easily, edit seamlessly, collaborate effortlessly, and even train your custom AI for digitizing and interpreting historical documents of any form.
Transkribus is best for difficult, old, or uncommon scripts. While it has plenty of errors, it doesn’t have hallucinations. These can then be corrected by uploading the image and transcription to an LLM for suggested corrections. Go to their site here: https://www.transkribus.org/.
Featuring their Old Handwriting AI tool
Virtual Booth Description: We develop software solutions for genealogists. At RootsTech we will be showing our Old Handwriting AI Transcription software that works right in your web browser.
This is a browser extension for Chrome that allows you to transcribe text on the page.
When I tested the app for my deed, it was not very accurate. It seems like it could be similar to Transkribus in that it really tries to read each character but its language model processing isn’t very strong. So it’s a trade off – you get many errors, but not hallucinations.
Virtual Booth Description: Do more genealogy in less time with Goldie May. Speed up research, untangle family trees, and stay happily organized. It works with FamilySearch, Ancestry, and the websites you already use. It does not replace your genealogy programs. However, it might replace your spreadsheet, your notebook, the papers on your desk, and the sticky notes on your monitor—all the places where you track your research and sort out what you’re finding. Keep the family tree you already have and see if Goldie May can add to it.
Richard added automatic transcription (with Gemini) for images added to the research log by upload or screenshot! This is a brand new feature launched at RootsTech!
This uses Gemini, the most accurate LLM for handwritten text recognition. Because it’s a language model, it will hallucinate every once and a while (so always fact check) but it’s often better than humans for English in the last 300 years. Go to the Goldie May website here: https://www.goldiemay.com/.
New feature called Scribe AI
Virtual Booth Description: MyHeritage offers users a meaningful discovery experience that unites their past, present, and future using sophisticated matching technologies, billions of international historical records, and at-home DNA tests. It is also home to the world’s best technologies for improving historical photos, including Deep Nostalgia®, the viral feature for animating historical photos. The MyHeritage DNA test pinpoints the specific places your ancestors came from across 2,114 geographic regions, providing the most in-depth analysis of any consumer DNA test. MyHeritage also offers a wealth of resources for expanding family history research, including a free online course and hundreds of articles and videos housed on the MyHeritage Knowledge Base.
MyHeritage launched their Scribe AI tool that transcribes, translates, and summarizes historical records. Unfortunately it does not yet allow users to correct the transcription, which perpetuates errors into the translation and summary. The FAQs suggest copy/paste to a text editor to make manual corrections to the transcription. Try it here: https://www.myheritage.com/scribe-ai.
Favorite Tools
I’ve tested all the tools with a 1792 Rockingham County, North Carolina, deed where Baldy Dyer was a witness. Goldie May with Gemini, Kindex, Scribe AI (by MyHeritage), and Leo were the most accurate. Because they have a side-by-side editor, my favorite tools are Kindex and Leo. I love the ability to check the original image and correct the text side-by-side.
Give them a try and share how it goes in the comments! I’d like to know which tools work best with differen scripts/time periods. My tests are always in English from the 1700s-1800s.
Do you want to learn more about using AI in genealogy research and writing? Our new edition of Research Like a Pro with AI Workbook (ebook) is on sale for $5 for the next week. It was fun to sell completely out of the limited eition spiral bound copies at our RootsTech booth! The ebook version is available for sale now and includes a printable PDF you can print and bind yourself at a print shop as well as an eBook (Word file) with text boxes for typing.
See our entire RootsTech 2026 Virtual booth here: https://familylocket.com/rootstech. There are several discounts on courses and webinars!
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