Read old German scripts with Transkribus
Transkribus reads Kurrent, Sütterlin and old German handwriting for you.
Transcribe old German scripts with Transkribus
Start transcribing old German scripts with Transkribus
How Transkribus helps you to translate Kurrent, Sütterlin, Fraktur or Antiqua to text
Decipher old German handwriting with AI-powered text recognition
Automatically recognise your historical documents and turn them into digital text. Transkribus helps you to convert Kurrent, Sütterlin and Fraktur script from the 15th to the 20th centuries. There are a number of publicly available artificial intelligence models you can use.
Manually transcribe and correct automatic translations
With the transcription editor, you can manually transcribe your old German scripts or you can correct transcription errors from the automatic transcription. The results of the automatic transcription can vary depending on the handwriting and the quality of the material.
Train your own AI text recognition models
You can also train specific text recognition models that are capable of recognising the exact old German scripts and handwriting in your material.
Search your old documents
With Transkribus, you can search your documents for names and keywords in addition to more advanced search options.
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Registered users
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HTR AI models trained
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Pages processed
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Free public AI models
How Transkribus works
Transkribus is a software that uses artificial intelligence to “learn” how to read old German handwriting. For this, the software first needs to be trained with a number of pages that have been manually transcribed. This so called “Ground Truth” enables Transkribus to understand and read the handwriting.
The model “German Giant” for instance was trained with more than 15 million words from many different hands. You can use this and other pretrained AI models to automatically recognise your Kurrent, Sütterlin , or Fraktur documents and convert them into normal text.
If you are able and willing to transcribe about 50 pages by yourself, you can also train a custom AI model. Your own model is then able recognise the exact handwriting in your specific documents.
About old German scripts
There are a number of old German scripts that were used in the German-speaking world between the 16th and 20th centuries. This period saw a number of handwritten scripts, including Kurrent script, Sütterlin, and Offenbacher script. But there were also some printed scripts such as Fraktur or Antiqua.
With the help of Transkribus, accessing and searching large numbers of historical documents written in old German scripts is now possible. By using one of the public models or a custom trained model, you can easily convert thousands of historical documents into digital text.
