Mark Humphries on Generative History

Thanks for the comment. We did this in an article in Historical Methids using an earlier version of the software: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01615440.2025.2500309. Transbrikus is a great tool but it is also expensive and our goal is not to create a competitor but an open-source alternative. For context, context, on a 10,000 word, 50 page English language 18th and 19th c test set using dozens of different hands, out of the box (ie without fine tuning or training), we found Gemini-2.5-pro achieved a WER of 4.89% and a CER of 2.63% (excluding punctuation and capitalization as both can be ambiguous). On the same test set, the latest Transkribus Titan model achieves 13.2% WER and 6.6% CER. Transkribus also costs around 24 cents per page versus 0.8 cents per page with Gemini-2.5-pro. Transkribus would probably approach and perhaps exceed Gemini’s performance if you fine tuned it on each ah d, but that requires around 50 pages of transcribed pages per hand. So on large datasets, Transkribus might be the best choice choice (and it might also be much better on non English sets, we don’t know). But for sets of mixed documents or small sets of documents (or where cost is an issue), Gemini-2.5-pro in the API via a program like Archive Studio offer an alternative.