What is OCR (optical character recognition)?
A technology that analyzes the shapes of letters in an image and turns them into text. Copy text from lecture slide screenshots, receipts, book page photos and business cards without retyping.
How to improve recognition
- Shoot text large, sharp and straight on
- In bright light without shadows or glare
- One column of text per image (crop two-column layouts separately)
- Handwriting and decorative fonts are recognized less accurately
The first run downloads the recognition engine and language data (several MB), which can take a while; after that it's faster. Images are never sent to a server.