I wonder how long this system will exist before ML gets good enough that it just makes more sense to send illegible mail back to the sender and say, "sorry, whatever you wrote is not a valid address, try again".
A lot of the stuff they process are actually machine printed, but for some reason the OCR just rejected. Had a bud that worked at the Utah facility, and the same sentient can be found through out the comment section of the Tom Scott video.
If it's so easy for a human to fix it, I wonder how long the pipeline is between feeding that as training data into the next iteration of the OCR, and getting it deployed live?
Never; this facility will likely continue to serve for as long as the people exchange mail.
Sure, you might say "the sender should write better", but that's needlessly discriminatory and flies in the face of what the United States Postal Service stands for. Not being able to immediately read the delivery address is not an excuse.
The USPS considers it an absolute failure to do their duty if they fail to deliver mail that was otherwise furnished properly, and I commend their commitment.
I really think you're overestimating the average postal worker's sense of "duty" as well as how the post office works as a whole system. The USPS once delivered a postcard I sent to myself, because their system confused my "from" address with the "to" address. When I complained, they told me to go buy another stamp and send a new postcard. My postcard was crystal clear to a human, but somehow their automated system got it confused, and yet they acted like it was my problem, not theirs. This was about 15 years ago so maybe their automated systems are better now, but I don't think their "duty" or "commitment" has changed that much.
The professionalism of a given postal worker, unfortunately, varies considerably from what I've experienced, I've had the pleasure of interacting with exemplary workers and the bad apples.
For something like this I don't want to base it around the bad apples, because this really is an example of the postal service being exemplary.
The Surface handwriting recognition has been good enough for many years to recognize my cursive handwriting, which is fairly impressive, but I do like the idea of a public service striving to be usable even by people with handwriting not easily read by a machine, just like it's usable by rural users and others who are probably not the best targets from a pure business-minded perspective.
I thought the vast majority are OCR and the humans are for the ones it fails at.
Regardless, all you have to do is tell people, say at the post office, that if they type the address and cut it out and tape it on, the mail will get there faster. Alternatively they could use a label maker to print out the address and then affix it to the envelope.
I bet people still writing address labels by hand probably mostly don't know that there's a speedup for fast machine legibility.
