[samwillis]

There was a brilliant Twitter thread last year showing a project to "hand write" with cnc robots thousands of personalised letters for a mailout. They initially started off with off the shelf hand writing robots, but ended up building their own massive ones to increase speed and efficiency.

https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/143888821947...

[mikkergp]

“How do we scale that feeling that someone got a personal handwritten note” is really dystopian.

[spicybright]

Very reminiscent of the movie Her, where the main character worked at a letter writing service you could pay someone to write thoughtful letters to family and friends.

[cm_silva]

In Japan you can rent a family.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_family_service

[landemva]

In Nevada you can rent a girlfriend experience. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/sex-wo...

[kyleee]

surely not just in nevada?

[enraged_camel]

I think that has been a thing in Japan for a long time!

[iambateman]

Last year I built an entire service [1] around the idea that scaling handwritten cards was a good business…

Before ultimately concluding that you’re right, it’s pretty dystopian.

So I called it quits.

[1] fountaincards.com

[gregsadetsky]

Was it working / were you making money?

Automated handwritten notes companies seem like they render text using a handwritten font and then potentially pass it off (via API) to a “print anything and ship it” company — is that an accurate statement?

Is there a clear advantage to building and maintaining the hardware / plotting pen portion? i.e. isn’t that something you could do by randomizing font parameters?

Also, it does seem like a pretty crowded space - was that ever a problem? Googling “handwritten notes automation” brings up a lot of companies/ads.

Thanks. Really curious about this!

[SoftTalker]

I feel like I've been able to detect these, e.g. examine the writing and note that each letter is exactly the same every time it appears -- real people don't write that precisely. Though I'm sure that some random variation would not be difficult to introduce.

Bottom line it's like anything else -- if I don't know the person who sent it to me, I don't trust it. Automated handwriting is just more big-tech destruction of yet another facet of human to human communications.

[iambateman]

I was about three years behind wallawe’s reply.

The technical parts are fun…the core thing for us was that it was actually written by a real pen. The difference between a print and real writing is obvious to most people, so we wanted it to be believable.

Our system used a set of handwritten fonts, along with a bunch of “fuzzing” of line height, line direction, and character swap outs. This created an SVG path that a robot used to trace with a pen.

The hardware and margins were what killed us. As wallawe noted, there’s still a lot of manual labor that goes into a system like this, even if the writing is automated. Envelope stuffing and card-envelope matching are big problems.

Its not a super competitive market yet, but the margins on what could be charged per card were pretty low, especially factoring in paper costs and labor costs.

[WalterBright]

> Our system used a set of handwritten fonts

What betrays handwritten fonts is nobody writes "a" the same way every time. I get that you're addressing this with fuzzing, but that's not enough. The pressure put on a pen also varies, people make mistakes and cross them out, there are ink blotches, etc.

[iambateman]

There were enough character alternates and special compound ligatures that it’s really hard to tell unless you know it’s machine-produced.

I think you would be surprised at how realistic it can be.

[wallawe]

I replied to parent, but we built the company that shows up #3 for that query (at least on my browser) - handwrite.io. I felt that there would be a massive audience for the API so worked on building that out in the early stages while my cofounder built the hardware. It's a super costly process, requires a lot of human touchpoints even when you've automated a lot of the machinery (e.g. sealing and stamping cards). There was a decent amount of competition but even more demand. We had a couple of good sales guys working strictly on commission that got us to 40k MRR ish in a relatively short timespan but the margins were horrible. In the end we burnt out and sold to a client.

[gregsadetsky]

Thanks a lot for sharing, really interesting.

I edited my comment so you may not have seen my additional question: why build out hardware vs. outsource the printing / mailing?

i.e. with enough randomness in the font/text/letter generation, was it still obvious to tell what was “handwritten” by a plotter vs printed?

And re: margins, you could have raised prices but that would have made you not competitive?

[wallawe]

> why build out hardware vs. outsource the printing / mailing?

we wanted the handwriting to feel as real as possible. to that end, my cofounder wrote an algo that varied each character slightly, the robots held real pens, etc. We couldn't find anyone to outsource the fulfillment to that matched this level of authenticity. Some competitors used lob.com and simply print an image of handwriting which actually can work pretty well, but is definitely recognizable if you look closely.

> re: margins, you could have raised prices but that would have made you not competitive?

This was a big point of contention between me and my cofounder. We raise them towards the end some but not enough. After selling, the company that bought us raised them substantially and are doing very well from what I understand. We should have done this early on, but focused too much on winning the deal which is what burnt us out in the end (too much business too quick, lots of sleepless nights).

[iambateman]

It is possible for a plotter using a real pen to make a card which is indistinguishable from a truly handwritten card.

People are rightfully squeamish about sending out cards which “look” handwritten but aren’t. Imagine a customer realizes that you are faking it…the consequences to reputation could be substantial.

That said, I personally find printed cards using handwritten-style font to be insulting, so that was a no-go for us.

We considered using a third party fulfillment service and essentially charging a fee on top of that, but the returns would be microscopic for the effort.

[wallawe]

We built and sold a similar business (handwrite.io) and it was a pretty rough experience. We scaled to 40k MRR within several months (bootstrapped) but the margins were terrible and hardware is not fun, especially not being a hardware guy so I had to rely on someone else to make sure we had an efficient/quality product.

[iambateman]

I looked at handwrite.io when I was getting started…impressive!

Sounds like y’all made it further than we did, so congratulations. :)

Totally agree on margins. I vowed to skip physical products on my next effort (moneyhabitshq.com).

[hnbad]

The article itself isn't much better. Great way to turn a nice thing from "Aw, that's sweet" to "Ugh, another piece of emotionally manipulative advertising".

[ImprobableTruth]

Yeah, if I find out that a company attempts to deceive me with this kind of thing, I'd completely stop buying from them.

[colechristensen]

Not at all new by the way. First parent is 220 years old.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

Faked signature by machine had been popular for 80 years.

[lotsofpulp]

I would have preferred a video FaceTime call from the business owner or one of the partners anyway.

[flanbiscuit]

Let's see, we already have deep faked audio that can be trained to sound like anyone, deep faked video, and chat bots that can be trained to talk/write like anyone, so scaling this to millions of customers is not far off

[gregsadetsky]

It already exists. I won’t link to anyone, but I just found a site claiming to be a “personalization platform for automated 1:1 video messaging”

They specifically show that their videos will use text to speech to personalize the “Hi $firstname” greeting at the top of the video.

Dystopian, like many people here are saying.

[lotsofpulp]

Once that happens, I will prefer a home visit and maybe a non soup meal.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Alternatively, "a scalable way to bring a little bit of joy to many people" is actually nice & good.

[lotsofpulp]

In the short term. In the long term, “a way to reduce trust in society”. It is why I assume everything on social media is staged.

[ekianjo]

You should assume zero trust in anything you see at this point, in case that was not already obvious.

[hnbad]

It's not "bringing joy", it's emotional manipulation. Intent matters. This isn't any better than MLM people pretending to be your friend in order to sell you tupperware.

In a single naive interaction, sure, it may bring joy. But repeated at scale throughout society, it creates distrust by being insincere and devalues sincere expressions of kindness, harming everyone.

[bombcar]

That’s the harm - you’re taking things the body and brain are used to and simulating them to elicit the response you want.

I’m sure a company could develop an AI advanced enough to imitate a cute employee who is really into you when you have an issue - and use that to encourage you to spend way more because “they love you”.

Hell, I bet you could offer “CEO on HackerNews” as a marketing service - keep an eye on posts involving your company and impersonate the CEO as necessary- and of course be able to actually call him in if needed. Probably already being done …

[colechristensen]

The thing about CEOs on HN is they have to say the right thing to be appealing. CEO on HN saying the wrong thing can really nail down the impression that a company is doing something awful and it’s not just the fault of the marketing intern or some misguided but well intentioned employee. If you hear the same crap from the top in a supposedly personal comment, there’s not much room left for assuming the best.

[bombcar]

That's why the service would be so valuable! People perfectly trained to craft just the right amount of "mea culpa" and "we'll make this right" and "we're not actually lizardmen from mars".

Heck, if you had multiple clients you could even "reinforce" each other. It's so good ... I'm kind of scared it's already being done.

[juve1996]

The reason it brings joy is because they think it's from a human. If they knew it wasn't it wouldn't bring joy.

[ekianjo]

Thats true for every product though. People are willing to pay more for something that pretends to be hand made rather than something manufactured. There is no new insight here.

[lotsofpulp]

They are willing to pay more for something they think is hand made, not for something they know pretends to be handmade. Fraud is not excusable.

[landemva]

Somehow Starbucks seems to excel at bringing prepackaged microwave food to a personalized premium price point. I stand there and watch them put it in the microwave.

[figassis]

Until everyone finds out what is happening and another last source of human connection becomes ruined. Writing a post about it is a surefire way to get there, but having te idea in the first place is how you start.

[ekianjo]

no more dystopian than AI text or image generation.

[sopooneo]

The real down-side to this, as with deepfakes, I think, is not that it makes fake things look real, but that it makes all real things possibly fake.

[MrDunham]

I really wish they had opened sourced this. Was just thinking of exactly that post, thanks for finding it.

It really makes a difference to have hand written with a pen as long as you have a font with multiple letter variants/subtly differences between the same letter used repeatedly.

[aarondf]

Open sourced the hardware or the software part? (Note: I'm the author of that twitter thread.)

The hardest part was probably the handwriting "generation." I put "generation" in quotes because it was mostly selecting one of the characters from the library of characters that we captured and putting it together with other characters.

The hardware had a lot of hard spots, but I think they were mostly hard because that was my first real foray into hardware.

[MrDunham]

Both? The hardware? I loved what you did and would love to replicate it.

[seydor]

yes ,because what we need is airplane-loads of machine-produced paper notes to travel around the world

[bombcar]

Anyone who owns real estate in certain markets is already familiar with the mountains of “handwritten” notes offering to buy far under market value. This’ll just make it harder to detect.

[reaperducer]

Reinventing the wheel. Hand writing robots at scale was a market for decades from the 1950's. They went away when desktop publishing arrived.

[aarondf]

Maybe, but what a fun wheel it was to reinvent! Honestly one of the more fun things I've done in my career.

I guess I could've just made another static site generator though ;)

[rob-olmos]

Maybe a static site generator that throws in random noise/errors so it feels like a handwritten HTML/CSS site?

[aarondf]

Now we're talking!

[moepstar]

https://nitter.net/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074

The "mobile.twitter.com" link doesn't work (for me, on desktop).

[generj]

As an AxiDraw pen plotter experimenter, I think business notes is the wrong market for this.

I’ve always thought wedding invitations would be better. Rather than faking handwriting the pen is used much in the way an emboss or deboss is - to raise the quality and prestige of the document. Fountain pens allow for intricate ink sheen and color combinations. Customers are also not price sensitive.

[aarondf]

In my experience (I created the robots in that twitter thread) the problem with the wedding invitations market is that they have to be almost totally perfect. With mass mail, you can have skew, slant, weird characters and it doesn't super matter.

[dundarious]

I've received seemingly hand-written "thank you/please buy more" notes from Soylent. Given the source, I have always suspected that they are an automated "forgery" in some sense. I wouldn't be surprised if they are truly hand-written, but it is interesting that I just can't accept them the same way as I do a hand-written note from, let's say, a local shop or a charity.

(I don't recommend Soylent, I just use it sometimes when I'm feeling mildly self-destructive and not feeling like eating healthy food, so it's my occasional "harm reduction" alternative to getting fast-food or trash processed food)

[aarondf]

Glad you enjoyed that! I built those robots :)

That thread was previously posted to HN (linked below in some replies) and the responses were... mixed, to say the least!

[tomatotomato37]

It's a shame this technology is used to deceive sincerity rather than just show off how advanced technology has become. Imagine an art house selling the "mass-produced" type of pieces you decorate hallways and hotels with, except they have a robot front and center in which you can watch the robot create your painting in real time!

[teddyh]

Discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28574908

and here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458

[waynesonfire]

and if you're ousted you're a manipulative prick in my book. i get all kinds of "hand written" marketing mail.

[Beltiras]

That was awesome! Thank you for the link.