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The High Tech Way That The Post Office Deals With Bad Handwriting
Hundreds of people squint at awful scrawl every day
I am one of many people in this world who have horrible handwriting. My poor teachers in grade school had to spend extra time deciphering my scribble and would often write nasty notes on my work, letting me know how displeased they were with the quality of my penmanship. While those days are long gone for me, it does raise an interesting question. How does the US Postal Service (USPS) deal with horrible handwriting? The mail is an integral part of modern society, so what happens when a letter, postcard, or package comes through with an indecipherable scrawl?
Any time a piece of mail is flagged for being unreadable, an image of the piece is immediately sent to a place called the Remote Encoding Center located in Salt Lake City. At the Remote Encoding Center (REC), dozens of employees pour over these images as they appear and tease out specific letters and numbers that can be used to flag a proper address from the master database. The USPS only needs the first letter of the city, a piece of the zip code, and a few characters from the street address to pull a proper address. (You can see this in action if you have ever used a shipping service linked to the USPS master database which can guess your address with just a zipcode and a couple of numbers.)
The REC employs over 800 people, and it operates 24/7, 365. Every day, the REC receives over 2 million images of mail, which is then passed along to a specially trained employee. Each employee can often find a proper address for an illegible piece of mail within 10 seconds. These employees scan these 2 million images all day and ensure that each piece is routed to its correct destination.
The humans stand in the gap where the AI stumbles. The humans are tasked with teasing out just enough to get the correct address. And time is of the essence. If a piece of mail does not get corrected while it is circling the belt at a sorting center, it will get dumped. Once a piece of mail is scanned multiple times and continues to circle, there are only a few seconds to reroute the mail before it has to get handled by a person or marked as return to sender.
