OCR technology is nothing new. There are multitudes of quality
OCR software
which helps you convert images and scanned documents into editable
text. But in this age of smartphone dominance, having some usable
OCR apps
is much desirable, specially since the smartphones these days come with
high quality camera which can be used to scan the document or image.
Android and iPhone OS have managed to dominate the smartphone market
and no wonder we see multitude of OCR apps (free and paid) available on
both these platforms. The key is to choose the best ones out there and
that is what we are aiming for in this post.
Top Android OCR Apps
Google dominates Android market in general and it’s no different when
it comes to OCR apps. Google Docs comes with the OCR feature and works
really well. As something exclusive for android, Google docs does a
pretty good job of converting the scanned document into text. But as you
would expect, there isn’t much of an option to deal with the output
other than saving it within the app itself. If you don’t mind
copy-pasting the converted document, this is the best OCR app you can
get and that too for free.
Another Google app which dominates the Android market and works well
as an OCR app too. Take a picture of any image and Google Goggles does a
fair job of turning it into an editable text. And the best part is, you
can paste that text to anywhere on your phone – be it on Gmail or SMS
or notes. What more? you can use Goggles to scan the business cards for
you and it can save the details into your contacts section in just a
click! Goggles comes with Google translate which helps you translate the
text into a ton of different languages.
OCR Test is an experimental app based on Tesseract and is free to
download and use. The accuracy of its OCR isn’t that great, but the way
it works is pretty similar to that of Goggles. One good feature when
compared to Goggles is that OCR Test comes with the “continuous preview”
feature which shows a dynamic, real-time display of what the app is
recognizing from the live image.
TextRact lets you turn image to live text using textract online
server at free-ocr.net. It needs an internet connection to work and also
comes in a premium version with added features.
Top iPhone OCR Apps
Image to Text app allows you to extract editable ASCII text from
images and share the results by Email or Evernote. All you need to do is
take a picture of the document using your iPhone’s camera and email the
image to yourself. You will then receive the image along with the text
file containing the editable text that was extracted from the image.
Works great for English language.
Perfect OCR isn’t a free app like any of the above ones. It costs
$3.99 as it converts the images to text ‘on the go’. It even stores the
history of the text generated. You can crop, rotate and recolor a taken
image. But then OCR functionality is pretty slow, as it requires you to
capture three images of the text.
Prizmo has to be the most sophisticated OCR app with an easy-to-use
interface. But then it costs $9.99, which isn’t cheap by any standards.
It is really professional and offers a lot of flexibility. Once the
results are generated, you can share them to Dropbox, Evernote and
others.
Word Lens isn’t one of those run-of-the-mill OCR apps. It’s an app
which took the world by storm with its unique interface and features.
Word Lens can be used to translate printed words from one language to
another with your built-in camera and in real time!
FotoNote costs $1.99, but offers multitude of features for the price.
You can use the iPhone camera to take the pictures of magazines or
receipts and then let Fotonote to use its OCR technology to convert the
photo into editable text. The extracted text can be emailed, copied to
clipboard or exported to apps like Facebook, Dropbox etc.
TextGrabber from Abbyy turns your iPhone into a multifunctional
mobile scanner with translation capability. Just take a picture of the
text, and you can immediately edit it or translate, share via e-mail and
SMS, or post directly to your account at on Facebook, Twitter and
Evernote.
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