Last week, at RootsTech 2026, MyHeritage announced Scribe AI, a tool that not only transcribes documents, it also provides a translation if written in a language other than English.

This tool piqued my interest because I have a small collection of letters written by my paternal grandmother Julia (Scerbak) Sabo’s family in Slovakia to her in New Jersey from the early 1900s until she died in 1985.

I’ve not been able to translate them because her family didn’t write in modern Slovak, they spoke and wrote in a Carpatho-Rusyn dialect from the Presov area of today’s Slovakia.

I had tried Google Translate, which was unable to do the job, telling me the language might be something related to the Croatian language.

So, how id Scribe AI do?

Here’s one page of a 1924 letter written by Maria Tidik, my grandmother’s younger sister:

My Slovak is very limited, but “Roku” as the top is “year” and “slava isuzu christu” is part of the then Greek Catholic liturgy and a common greeting – Glory to Christ.

I can also see my grandmother’s name “juli sabol” five lines up from the bottom, but what of the rest?

Scribe AI came to the rescue and I’m impressed!

Maria’s cursive skills weren’t terrific and the only “error” – a minor one – is that ScribeAI gave her surname as Didik instead of the correct Tidik.

Notice, too, that AI (of which I’m not overly fond in any form) is truly a genealogist’s helper giving Historical Context – AND correctly identified the language as a phonetically written dialect of Eastern Slovakia or Carpatho-Rusyn!!!!

The Carpatho-Rusyns are called the People from Nowhere because they’ve never had a single united homeland, living in southern Poland, eastern Slovakia, Ukraine and a small portion of Romania.

Most people have never heard of the Carpatho-Rusyns so I am pretty much floored that Scribe AI correctly identified Nana’s dialect.

Just as an aside, re: the content of the first page of this letter – I’m a bit surprised that Maria wrote an entire page just saying hello from her family to Nana’s, but that seems to have been the family style of writing.

To learn more about Scribe AI, here’s the MyHeritage blog post with details.

There is a link to try Scribe AI at the bottom of the MyHeritage post.

I can’t over emphasize how impressed I am by Scribe AI. Wow!!!

Thank you, MyHeritage!