How the US Postal Service reads terrible handwriting

Summary by Krater

Tom Scott visits the United States Postal Service Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, to try manually processing unreadable handwritten mail under tight time constraints.

From the video

Answers: How does the United States Postal Service process unreadable handwritten mail?

• Remote Encoding Center
• handwritten mail processing
• optical character recognition
• USPS address verification rules

What it concludes

• In 1997, REC operations keyed 19 billion images, whereas in 2021, the remaining REC keyed only 1.2 billion images.
• Over 99 percent of mail is read successfully by automated OCR, leaving about 1 percent for manual remote encoding.
• Operators must maintain an average pace of about 4 seconds per piece of mail.