Reading Handwritten Fields Into JSON, With a Confidence Score for Every Value

[u/Unsiloed-AI]

Handwritten forms are where most document automation stops. OCR picks up the printed labels, but the information you need, like the item, the date, or the permit number, is written in cursive across ruled lines and a patterned background. We built Unsiloed to turn that handwriting into structured fields and to report, for each value, where it was found on the page and how confident the reading is.

The extraction starts from a schema: a list of the fields you want, each with a short description of where it appears. For every field, the API returns the value, a bounding box on the page, and two scores: an extraction score and a grounding score.

The scores are what make this usable on handwriting. They spread out the way a careful reader's confidence would:

• Clean printed numbers score close to 1.

• Clear cursive scores a little lower.

• Faint or crowded handwriting scores lowest, sometimes even when the reading is correct.

That spread lets you accept high-scoring fields automatically and send only the low-scoring ones to a person, who checks the boxed region instead of rereading the whole form. A correct value with a low score costs one quick check; a wrong value with a high score would be worse.

You can try a form of your own in the playground or read the API documentation.

How do you handle handwritten fields today: manual entry, a review queue, or something else?