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Leo is an all-in-one transcription and document management platform designed for professional historians, archivists, and researchers. It uses cutting-edge AI to transform images of historical documents into plain text that’s accessible, searchable, and ready for advanced analysis. It also provides an intuitive platform to store, organize, edit, and search documents, with file structure management, advanced search, and metadata filtering capabilities.

  • Leo Transcription Grants: apply for up to 100,000 free credits

    Leo Transcription Grants: apply for up to 100,000 free credits

    We’re offering up to 100,000 free credits for students, academics, and archives to use Leo, our AI-powered transcription and document management platform

    Leo is a web app designed for historians, archivists, and other researchers working with handwritten manuscripts and printed text in Latin scripts (including English, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, German, etc.) from the later medieval period to the present. It uses cutting-edge AI to transform images of historical documents into plain text that’s accessible, searchable, and ready for advanced analysis. Beyond transcription, it also provides an intuitive environment for storing, editing, organizing, searching, and exporting documents. For more information, click here.

    This grant is open to everyone*: undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, independent researchers, research groups, libraries, archives, and cultural organizations. We welcome proposals for projects of all scales, from smaller initiatives requiring only a modest number of credits to larger undertakings that make use of the full allocation.

    Each grantee will receive up to 100,000 credits, in addition to a 24-month subscription package with storage to host those images. As every credit transcribes a single image, whether of a page or a double-page spread, awardees will be able to transform as many as 200,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts into searchable plain text. They will also gain full access to Leo’s suite of tools to organize, edit, manage, and export their collections. 

    *There is only one condition of receiving a Leo Transcription Grant. The awardee must publish the transcription output, either on our platform or another they choose, within 24 months of receiving the grant. The transcriptions along with the corresponding images must be made available online free of restriction and copyright (CC0/ equivalent public-domain open license).

    Entries will be evaluated on their scholarly quality, originality, and for potential impact for unlocking new insights about the past. We’re especially interested in projects that extend access to the historical record, demonstrate thoughtful engagement with new technologies in the service of scholarship, and/or that would have been difficult or impossible to accomplish without our support. 

    LTGs may be for academic, charitable, or business purposes. Entrants will be asked to complete a short form, providing their name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), a brief project proposal (up to 500 words), which explains how their project will contribute to historical scholarship or public understanding of the past, as well as a short description (up to 100 words) of the materials they intend to transcribe.

    Awards will be made on an ongoing basis. We will follow up on your application and/or provide you with a final decision within one week.

    Please note that printed materials are not eligible for this prize and that awarded credits are non-transferable. If you have any questions or wish to discuss further, please contact jon@tryleo.ai. 

    To enter the competition, please complete the form here.

  • Leo wins Emergent Ventures grant to accelerate development and growth

    We’re excited to announce that Leo has won an Emergent Ventures grant worth $50,000 to support the growth of the platform in the coming months.

    Leo is an all-in-one transcription and document management platform designed for professional historians, archivists, and researchers working with handwritten manuscripts and printed text in Latin scripts from the later medieval period to the present. It uses cutting-edge AI to transform images of historical documents into plain text that’s accessible, searchable, and ready for advanced analysis. It also provides an intuitive platform to store, organize, edit, and search documents, with file structure management, advanced search, and metadata filtering capabilities.

    Emergent Ventures is a fellowship and grant program administered by the economist and talent scout Tyler Cowen at the Mercatus Center. It “supports entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, ‘zero to one’ ideas for meaningfully improving society.” The program backs focused, high-upside projects around the world, favoring speed, scrappiness, and ambitious outcomes.

    We’ll use the grant to:

    • Expand training data across scripts, languages, and periods
    • Train our model for more epochs to improve accuracy and robustness
    • Introduce semantic search using vector embeddings
    • Add interpretation features, allowing users to translate, summarize, and interpret transcripts
    • Allow users to fine-tune our model on corrected transcripts
    • Improve onboarding and documentation to make the platform easier to use
    • Fix bugs and smaller issues on the web-app

    We’ll also invest in marketing, including paid advertising, community seeding, and a brand relaunch that leverages our lion mascot as a bumbling yet enthusiastic palaeographer for reach on social media.

    To date, we have fully bootstrapped the venture, investing personal capital to hire developers and cover computing costs. With the help of this generous grant, we’ll be able to continue to develop Leo into a self-sustaining business, without losing the speed and operational agility that got us here. Thank you to Emergent Ventures for their support!

  • How Leo helped Michael Naylor transcribe a forgotten Victorian diary

    How Leo helped Michael Naylor transcribe a forgotten Victorian diary

    When Michael Naylor tackled the last papers he’d inherited from his father, he found a leather-bound, green notebook in nineteenth-century handwriting and packed with pressed leaves. It belonged to his great-grandmother’s branch of the family, but its author was a mystery.

    Had it been in the family long?
    Yes, my father, who died twenty years ago, had inherited a tin box of papers from his own father, which was labelled “Mrs Naylor”. It also included some other handwritten family notes and old newspaper clippings which belonged to my great-grandmother, Nina Mather Naylor.

    Had anyone tried to transcribe the diary before?
    No.

    What gave you the idea to tackle it yourself?
    I had no idea who had written the diary and I had some time, thanks to recovery from double-hip-replacement surgery. But I couldn’t learn who wrote it until I could actually read it.

    How did you first hear about Leo?
    After several “ordinary” AI tools kept inventing words, I searched for something better. Google served up Transkribus and Pen-to-Print but neither worked for me. Somewhere in those results was Leo. It transcribed the first nine pages nearly perfectly and so I went ahead and transcribed the rest of the diary.

    What challenges did the diary itself present?
    The diary is in reasonably good physical condition but some challenges included faded ink, bleed-through (“ghost” text), Victorian spellings (the long-s), and cramped lines. The writing style also presented difficulties. I’ve been told by the few who have read it that it resembles that of Jane Austen!

    Any “aha” moments?
    Leo’s transcript let me cross-reference birth dates from family-tree records, including where the diary’s author refers to her father’s birthday and her mother’s anniversary of death. Eventually, I narrowed it down to two women, before reviewing the part of the transcript where the author described being consoled for toothache by a young neighbour who refers to “poor Charlotte”. That was the breakthrough moment. This was Charlotte Needham Medley (1816-1903).

    Why is the finished transcript a special wedding gift for your daughter?
    My daughter is also a Charlotte, so I decided to gift the original diary accompanied with a bound transcript and historical notes as a wedding present to her.

  • Introducing ATR-1 — our most advanced text recognition model yet

    Introducing ATR-1 — our most advanced text recognition model yet

    We’re excited to launch our most advanced model yet. ATR-1 sets a new benchmark for automated text recognition, transcribing handwritten and printed text with unprecedented accuracy and reliability.

    What’s new?

    • Fewer hallucinations: Leo now more consistently avoids transcription errors like repeated or invented text, especially at the end of documents
    • More complete outputs: Significantly fewer blank pages and skipped lines, giving you fuller, more faithful transcripts
    • Smarter formatting: Enhanced recognition of structured layouts, including tables, margin notes, and other non-linear text features
    • Better with books: Improved performance on double-page spreads and printed texts that previously caused issues

    What’s next?

    • Support for later medieval manuscripts (c. 1100–1500) written in Latin scripts
    • Improved transcription accuracy for modern European languages, including French, German, Italian, and more
    • More robust handling of damaged, distorted, or rotated images, enabling reliable transcription even in more challenging cases

    How can I use it?

    ATR-1 is now the default model on Leo. You can transcribe new or existing images using it by hitting “Transcribe” as usual. To get started, click here to access your Leo dashboard.