Old handwriting and recorded voices: an AI that makes your archives searchable, on servers in Switzerland
Parish registers in Kurrent, council minutes in a chancery hand, forty hours of recorded testimonies. Fewer people read these scripts every year, and nobody has time to listen to forty hours. A researcher asks for every mention of one family name. Where do you start?
The short answer: handwriting recognition turns scanned pages into text, speech recognition does the same for recordings, and a local model helps search, sum up and index the result, each passage linked to its page or its minute. An archivist checks what gets published. It runs on servers in Switzerland, Meow's or your own. How well it reads your scripts and voices is something to test, on your own scans and recordings.
Checked against the law on 30 September 2026
Who can still read this?
- 30 years
Federal archives are, as a rule, open to the public after a 30-year protection period (Archiving Act, art. 9). Cantonal and communal archives follow their own law.
- 50 years
Federal files indexed by name that hold sensitive personal data are closed to the public for 50 years unless the person consented; the period ends three years after the person's death, and earlier access can be authorised (arts. 11 and 13). Whether they may be transcribed in a given environment is a separate question.
- Script by script
Kurrent, chancery hands, faded ink: recognition has to be tested on your own scans, for each script and each period.
How to test it
0 of 8 checked
From your collections, easy and hard: several hands, several centuries, several speakers.
Or use transcriptions you already have: that's your answer key.
Recognise the pages and the audio, and compare with your transcriptions line by line.
Names, places and dates read wrong matter more than a misspelled common word.
Kurrent, Latin script, printed forms: results differ, so count them separately.
Swiss German, background noise, worn tapes: note where it breaks down.
Whether records may be processed in this environment, and whether the results may be published: your archive law answers both.
The model transcribes and indexes; an archivist checks what is published and what stays closed.
Ticked them all? The kit turns this into a test you can run next week: what it reads well and what to check, transcription rules to start from, the test plan, and what to count before sizing a server. Get the kit
What it reads well, and what to check
The kit covers six kinds of material. Two of them:
- A printed or typed page
- The easy case; check names, numbers and dates.
- A register in an old hand
- Test on your own scans: results vary with the script, the scribe and the ink.
- A page in Kurrent
- In the kit
- A recorded interview
- In the kit
- A recording in dialect
- In the kit
- A search across the whole collection
- In the kit
Why it runs in Switzerland
Archives hold files still under protection periods, and personal data about people who may still be alive. Transcribed on servers in Switzerland, Meow's or your own, the scans and recordings don't pass through a public AI service.
What it needs
Handwriting recognition for your scripts, speech recognition for recordings, and a model for search, on a server with a graphics card. Digitising a collection is a batch job that runs at its own pace, for weeks if needed: the Meow Academy's planner shows how models fit on hardware.
Where does your firm stand?
The self-check takes two minutes and says which first step fits. Or talk it through in a free 15-minute call.
Book a free 15‑minute call
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What happens in 15 minutes
- 0–5 min
Your situation
What AI should do for you, and what it must never see.
- 5–10 min
What's possible
Which tasks can run privately, roughly what it costs, and what should stay human.
- 10–15 min
The next step
A test on your own documents, an assessment, or nothing yet.
Prefer to write? Send a message
Tell us what you'd like AI to do, and what it must never see. We'll tell you honestly what's possible, what it costs and what should stay human. No details yet? A hello is enough.