Doctors have long been accused of sloppy handwriting. Google is using AI to translate their scribbled notes.

• Google is working on an AI model to translate hard-to-read handwriting, like on doctors' notes.
• The company announced it's working with pharmacists on the AI model that will be in Google Lens.

Google is working with pharmacists to create an AI model that can read hard-to-read handwriting — something doctors have long been accused of having.

The company demonstrated the AI feature at its annual Google for India conference on Monday, but Dr. Manish Gupta, director of research at Google India, said "much work still remains to be done before the system is ready for the real world."

From the demonstration, it looks like users can take a photo of their prescription or upload a photo to the tool for processing. Any medications in the note will be highlighted.

The tool, which has no expected launch date, would be a part of Google Lens — Google's AI tool that can translate languages and recognize different objects, available in the search bar of the Google app.

"This will act as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology," Google said in its blog post.

Doctors' handwriting can potentially lead to deadly consequences for patients, Time reported, citing a 2006 study from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine. The report said sloppy handwriting from doctors was estimated to kill over 7,000 people a year at the time, and over 1.5 million Americans are injured by mistakes with their medication.

However, a 1996 study published in the National Library of Medicine found that doctors' handwriting is no worse than that of people who aren't doctors.

"This study fails to support the conventional wisdom that doctors' handwriting is worse than others'," the study's authors concluded. "Illegible writing is, however, an important cause of waste and hazard in medical care, but efforts to improve the safety and efficiency of written communication must approach the problem systemically — and assume that the problems are in inherent in average human writing-rather than treating doctors as if they were a special subpopulation."