OCR Of handwriting

I started to play around with some of the services that are offered by Azuer to see if I would be able to use them to handle the OCR of the slide mounts...

I tried this image that I just snapped with my iPhone:

I uploaded this to the demo site that Azure has and I was amazed at the output:

Even though the writing was sideways and messy as all get out, it was still able to make out "office" from the handwritten part. It was even able to cipher out the "MAY 59" from the imprint on the mount, despite the fact it's overlapping with the "P-703" that was printed on there as well.

To say I'm impressed if understating it.

To run everything that I have through this will only cost around $40 -- 20K slides * two sides. $1/1000 images isn't too bad all told.