handwriting recognition with simple training

I've been reading (and trying) OCR programs suggested in previous answers but I'm still without a clear answer to my problem.

I need to recognize handwritten English text. The text would be multiple lines but each line is only one or two words length. The text is from a different person at time. I could ask that person to provide a training file (e.g. with the alphabet and 0-9 numbers) but I cannot really ask for a much more complicated training than this.

I need to integrate the recognition as part of another (Java) application but the solution doesn't need to be Java. I can just execute it from Java and get the results from a text file.

Any recommendations?

I've already tested Tesseract (bad results without training and training looks quite complex). Java OCR looked like the perfect solution (simple training, open source and Java) but it doesn't work well even with their own example开发者_JAVA技巧s (anybody has had a better experiencie?). GOCR does not seem very active.

Of course I prefer free solutions but this is not a MUST (though the problem I see with a commercial option is that I must be able to integrate it in my own app which will be offered as SaaS)

From my experience ABBYY is one of the best for handwriting recognition, even without training. (It's possibly one of the most expensive too, though...) They have an SDK for Java.

http://www.abbyy.com

With a free trial, it's definately worth a look!

I am on the lookout for a handwritten text recognition software. So far the only one giving better results than even abby 11 has been SimpleOCR using the same text for both, which is a freeware for ocr but a 14 day trial for HCR!

I know I am answering after nearly 6 years. But if anyone's still looking, try using tensorflow. Their website has a simple example for handwritten digit recognition(MNIST). You can use this example and implement it for handwritten alphabet recognition (you need training data for this, I used NIST special Database 19 to get this data).