This Neural Network Has Better Handwriting Than You

While humans are watching their collective penmanship skills slowly fade away as digital products replace the need for handwriting, neural networks are learning to write, and at least one is getting pretty good at it. Researchers have demonstrated a neural network learning to write in different styles, and you can use it to create your own custom handwritten message. The handwriting is performed solely by predicting points in each letter, and has different styles that can be randomized or custom set.

The handwriting is "written" by a Long Short-term Memory recurrent neural network, and it is designed to show the type of complex sequences that can be generated with such networks via data point prediction. The network predicts points in a text sequence and uses its predictions to create the handwriting you see below.

The neural network is capable of different writing styles, something that is best demonstrated by having it write the same phrase multiple times. The process isn't perfect — the network gets pretty messy on occasion, and though you can adjust it to produce more legible results, it will reduce its stylistic variations as a result.

You can have the neural network write out your own text here. The tool is limited to 100 characters, so you won't be able to use it to pen a fancy love letter on your behalf. In addition, the neural network is better at writing lower case letters than in caps.

SOURCE: Ycombinator