I Used Vertex AI to Build an App That Reads My Handwriting (And It's Terrible But I Love It)

My handwriting is illegible. Even I can't read it sometimes. So I built an app using Google Cloud's Vertex AI and the Vision API. I take a photo of my notes, upload it, and the AI tries to transcribe them. The results are hilariously bad. It thinks my 'hello' is 'he11o' and my 'meeting notes' become 'meet in goats'. But that's the fun part. I've been training a custom model on my handwriting, and every week it gets a little better. Vertex AI makes this easy. I don't need to be a machine learning expert. I just need data. The platform handles the training, the deployment, the scaling. My app is getting smarter. One day it might actually read my notes. Until then, it's a fun project that taught me more about ML than any course ever could.