OCR madness .....

Russell · Post by **Russell** » Wed Dec 13, 2006 3:11 am

Hi mary

I am beginning to feel that neither quality or quantity matter these days.

Its PROFIT MARGINS that matter. Who cares about the customer. Phone the customer helpline and you are put into a queue and end up conversing with a machine which asks you to choose a number then transfers you to another line with a different bit of Musack where another machine asks for another number and so on.......

These machines do the OCR stuff in their spare time but keep getting interrupted by difficult customers

That's why they get it wrong.
Meantime the Customer Service Manager has been suspended for having too many extended lunches so there are no humans available to divert the phone lines to when they run out of numbers.
Irate customers have to hang up and resort to angry letters instead but they have no effect because they are read by the OCR equipment which can't make sense of them anyway.

Am I getting carried away by this or will the 'Nice young men in their clean white coats be coming to take me away Ha, Ha!'
Ho, Ho, Hee,Hee

This is Russell from an asylum near you

DavidWW · Post by **DavidWW** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 5:28 pm

The following is the relevant part of an email received from Ancestry today, -

"Ancestry has chosen our transcription vendors after
comparing against multiple competitors in India, Bangladesh, Eastern
Europe, and in China.

We have a long-term relationship with our vendors going back nearly ten
years, during which time they have consistently demonstrated leadership
in their field. They employ more than 4,000 paleaographers and
approximately 1000 of those employees are dedicated to Ancestry work.

Of those employees, the average data entry employee has 2-3 years of
experience transcribing handwritten records for Ancestry, including US,
UK, Canada, and Scottish census projects. The senior project managers
have 6-7 years of experience working with Ancestry.

All new paleaographers are required to complete a rigorous training
course before being put on a project. Experience has shown us that it
takes 2-4 months to complete the training and become a fully productive
transcriber. Employees who have been on the job for at least a year are
the most accurate and efficient. Our long-standing relationship provides
us with access to many well seasoned paleaographers who do not need to
complete training, or work through a learning curve when transcription
of a new project begins.

Our transcription vendors have keyed more historical English, Scottish,
and Welsh records than all other operations in the world, volunteer or
commercial, combined."

"In terms of content production, we deploy a complex combination of
methods ranging from partial, to full transcription, as well as varying
levels of automated processing using the latest scanning technology. We
also utilize underlying artificial intelligence methods to support this.
In addition, Quality Assurance processing is standard in all our
releases. As for our specific processing methods, these are naturally
dependent on the nature of the content, record type, source format,
quality of source originals etc. etc. Where censuses are concerned these
remain a manual transcription process essentially. We will of course,
continue to refine and enhance our user search experience on these
critical record sets overtime through the regular maintenance releases
we undertake on all our major collections."

My comment is as follows.....

The statement "Where censuses are concerned these remain a manual transcription process
essentially" just doesn't stack up with what we and others have seen in terms of
gross errors in terms of the comments made above about the extensive experience and
expertise that Ancestry emphasize their "transcription vendors" have,
the "rigorous training" given, and Ancestry's "Quality Assurance processing "

David

PS Interesting to note that Ancestry decribe their transcribers as palaeographers !
dww

Russell · Post by **Russell** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 9:24 pm

It would appear then that their

Quality Assurance processing is standard in all our releases.

standards of Quality Control are grossly inefficient.

Russell

Post by **emanday** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 9:32 pm

Either that or they need a visit to specsavers

(small s so not advertising

)

DavidWW · Post by **DavidWW** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:49 pm

Russell wrote:It would appear then that their
Quality Assurance processing is standard in all our releases.
standards of Quality Control are grossly inefficient.

Russell

To use a phrase that has developed a rather interesting meaning deriving from its use in a certain BBC series, - "I couldn't possibly comment" - with all that such a comment implies in terms of my willingness or otherwise to believe, and/or put any trust in the reply that I received from Ancestry <v sad g>

David

DavidWW · Post by **DavidWW** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:52 pm

emanday wrote:Either that or they need a visit to specsavers (small s so not advertising )

To use a phrase that has developed a rather interesting meaning deriving from its use in a certain BBC series, - "I couldn't possibly comment" - with all that such a comment implies in terms of my willingness or otherwise to believe, and/or put any trust in the reply that I received from Ancestry <v sad g>

David

Post by **emanday** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 11:51 pm

The spiel they gave is a perfect example of a marketing department's first rule when a searching question or complaint has been received...

Say nothing but use a lot of words to do so, and never admit to anything!

Post by **AnneM** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 12:12 pm

I would say it was a considered response and proposition or alternatively it could be a bold organisaitonal lengthy listing of cogent knowlegeable sentences!!!

Anne

Post by **emanday** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 5:43 pm

Like I said

Say nothing but use a lot of words to do so, and never admit to anything

Post by **AnneM** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 10:34 pm

That was my initial reaction as well.

Anne