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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The Ukrainian tech platform Lapathoniia has launched a unique online service, "Rukopys OCR," which can recognize even the most difficult handwritten texts in Ukrainian. This development opens a new era for historians, archivists, and ordinary users.
How the Ukrainian handwriting recognizer works
The cutting-edge service works directly in a web editor and via a dedicated programming interface, allowing users to upload documents in various formats. The technology can, in a single pass, detect text regions, classify them, and quickly recognize the entire handwritten text. Developers of the Lapathoniia service told Channel 24 this exclusively.
The foundation for the service was the large-scale hackathon "Handwritten to Data," organized by representatives of the "AI HOUSE" community, the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Catholic University with effective support from the Ministry of Digital Transformation. More than 870 specialists from around the world participated in the competition, forming 198 teams and submitting over 6 800 solution variants to the Kaggle platform.
The team "Dantists" received 4000 dollars for first place, Dmytro Kovalenko received 2000 dollars for second place, and Japanese specialist Tetsuya Fujimura received 1000 dollars for third.
Although the top two winners presented more complex models, Lapathoniia's developers chose the compact solution from the Japanese participant for their service. Tetsuya Fujimura donated his prize to support Ukraine and also published his own model, "Rukopys-OCR-4B," under a permissive license.
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He built his model on the large language model Qwen 3.5 4B, and the competition organizers later released the unique "RUKOPYS" dataset on Hugging Face, which covers archival materials from the past 100 years.
Why the Ukrainian AI is better than Google's development
According to detailed tests on closed data, the domestic solution showed an impressive advantage over the Gemini 3 Flash model. The Ukrainian model makes 59 to 64 percent fewer errors when reading text. The overall quality score of "Rukopys OCR" reached 0,9137, while the foreign analog from the well-known company received only 0,7838.
Rukopys OCR / Image Lapathoniia
The developers hosted the service infrastructure on the capacities of the Ukrainian cloud provider "De Novo" in Kyiv. This guarantees reliable protection of sensitive information, as the cloud holds a state security certificate and fully complies with international standards.
Currently, noncommercial scientific institutions and medical associations in Lviv have already received free access to the system to work with their archives, as also reported by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.
Rukopys OCR / Image Lapathoniia
How the technology will change Ukrainians' lives
The unique web interface allows uploading files in many popular formats. After automatic processing, users can edit the boundaries of text blocks, change their type, and merge or split parts of the text directly on their computer screen.
The service offers a free trial period for private individuals, and for large volumes the cost will range from 0,018 to 0,03 dollars per page.
In addition, government bodies plan to integrate the winning team's development into their own services, including the "yeDozvil" system and the "Mriia" mobile app. This will help automatically check students' homework and significantly speed up the digitization of the State Archive of Ukraine's collections, preserving our unique historical heritage for future generations.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Новий український онлайн-інструмент розшифровує складні рукописи за лічені секунди". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
