How to Make an AI Read Your Handwriting (LAB)

John Green Bot wrote his first novel! Today, in our first ever Lab we’re going to program a neural network to recognize handwritten letters to convert the first part of John Green Bot’s novel into typed text. To do this we’re going to import a labeled dataset, called EMNIST, we’ll to use a pre-written library called SKLearn to build the network, we’ll train and tweak our code until it’s accurate (enough), and then we’ll use our newly trained network to convert John Green Bot’s handwritten pages. We created this project in a way that you don’t have to install anything on your computer, the only thing you’ll need to get started is a Google account and a sense of adventure! To run the Colaboratory file (link at the top) you’ll have to click “open in playground” at the top of the page OR open the File Menu and click “Save a Copy to Drive.” From there you can change, tweak, and edit the code as you wish. We also left text around and within the code to help you along the way.