Handwritten Text Recognition on Gemini

I just saw this old (almost a year old, which is ancient in AI terms) article on Google Gemini 3 essentially solving the problem of Handwritten Text Recognition for historical English documents. The author reports results at or better than skilled human transcribers without fine tuning. An important point, he notes, "We obtained the best performance with temperature (how variable the model’s outputs are) set to 0, media resolution to high (the best image quality), and the thinking level at the minimum of 128." Temperature of 0 ensures maximally consistent results, and the low thinking level stops the model from second-guessing itself. For our Psalms project we have been experimenting with AI-generated transcriptions of Hebrew Masoretic Manuscripts, but none of the systems can as yet accurately read the vowels and accents. We are cooperating with the Open Masorah project to try to use our human-labelled transcriptions to improve performance on this task.