The first time I saw it, I thought they had people in some call center doing the reading. But they don't, at least not often.

The US Postal Service used to have 55 centers where humans tried to read envelopes that the machines couldn't. They're now down to one. "We get the worst of the worst. It used to be that we’d get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren’t good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine."

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...