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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The Ukrainian technology platform Lapathoniia has launched a unique online service, Rukopys OCR, which can recognize even the most complex handwritten texts in Ukrainian. This development opens a new era for historians, archivists, and ordinary users.
How the Ukrainian manuscript recognizer works
The latest service operates directly in the web editor and through a dedicated API, allowing documents in various formats to be uploaded. The technology can identify text regions in one pass, classify them, and quickly recognize the entire handwritten text. About this, 24 exclusively told to Channel developers of the Lapathoniia service.
The basis for creating the service was the large hackathon "Handwritten to Data," held by representatives of the AI HOUSE community, the Ministry of Economic Development of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Catholic University with active support from the Ministry of Digital Transformation. More than 870 specialists from different corners of the world participated in the competition, forming 198 teams and submitting more than 6 800 solutions on the Kaggle platform.
The team "Dantists" won 4000 dollars, Dmytro Kovalenko took second place for 2000 dollars, and Japanese specialist Tezuya Fujimura took third for 1000 dollars.
Although the first two prize-winners presented more complex models, the Lapathoniia developers chose for their service exactly the compact Japanese solution. Tezuya Fujimura donated his prize to support Ukraine, and also published his own model "Rukopys-OCR-4B" under a free license.
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He built his model on the basis of the large language model Qwen 3.5 4B, and the competition organizers later published a unique dataset "RUKOPYS" on the Hugging Face site, covering archival materials over the last 100 years.
Why Ukrainian AI is better than the Google development
According to detailed tests on closed data, the domestic solution demonstrated a striking advantage over the Gemini 3 Flash model. The Ukrainian model makes 59 – 64 fewer errors when reading text. The overall quality score of "Rukopys OCR" reached 0,9137, while the foreign counterpart from a well-known company received only 0,7838.
Rukopys OCR / Lapathoniia Images
The developers placed the service infrastructure on the Ukrainian cloud provider "De Novo" in Kyiv. This guarantees reliable protection of sensitive information, as the cloud has a state security certificate and fully meets international standards.
Currently, non-profit scientific institutions and medical associations in Lviv have already gained free access to the system to work with their archives, as also announced by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.
Rukopys OCR / Lapathoniia Images
How the technology will change the lives of Ukrainians
A unique web interface allows uploading files in many popular formats. After automatic processing, users can edit text block boundaries, change their type, merge or split parts of text directly on the computer screen.
The service offers a free trial period for private individuals, and for large volumes the price will be from 0,018 to 0,03 dollars per page.
Additionally, state authorities plan to integrate the winning team's development into their own services, in particular into the "eDostup" system and the mobile application "Dream". This will help automatically check students' homework and significantly speed up the digitization of the State Archives Fund, 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.
