“Much of what family search does is gather and store the world’s historical records,” Alexander continued, “especially those records that tell about people and their relationships to each other.” Unless there’s a rapid uptake in indexing these documents, these records will never be accessible to the public, which is FamilySearch’s goal. Once it’s taught a language, the other languages in the family become much easier to teach - it’s a sort of exponential process.Īnd quicker than they could’ve imagined, the AI could read documents in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and index what would take human indexers half a century in just a few months. Not to mention that it’s starting to read handwriting from the 1400s, which can be difficult for human volunteers.
