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"Linux support ... Headless (command line interface) Most normal (non-techie) users aren't going to care about these though. I can see the OCR being a big win

"Linux support ... Headless (command line interface) Most normal (non-techie) users aren't going to care about these though. I can see the OCR being a big win among college students...scan in all your handwritten notes, and boom! they're all indexed and searchable and won't get lost before you need them for your final exam.

EvilTerran 15y ago
OCR doesn't mean handwriting recognition, though... handwriting's a heck of a lot harder than print.
- patrickk 15y ago
  I was wondering about that as I was typing...damn that would be cool to have. If lots of people's handwriting was scanned in and used as a training dataset, that could be a way to do it on Google scale - like what they did with Google voice, training it for all different accents.
- robryan 15y ago
  Google are probably best placed to pull it off though with recaptcha.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  Actually, Evernote's OCR does handwriting, and at least for me, does it pretty well. It's not going to give you a transcription, but it's good enough that the doc will show up if you're searching for it.
  - evgen 15y ago
    That is probably because the Evernote founders were the team that developed the CalliGrapher cursive recognition engine which was used by the Apple Newton back in the day.
    - tomkarlo 15y ago
      Maybe, but it seems to me that for search (especially with stemming / misspelling coverage) you need a much lower OCR accuracy than for converting into text. Like maybe 95% vs 99.5% - you can have an order of magnitude more errors and search would still work fine.
archivator 15y ago
Yes, well, that was Evernote's promise, too. Doesn't quite work unless you write in this extremely separated neat handwriting that no one taking notes could possibly be writing in :) Cursive (the way most people outside the States write) is straight out.
rogerbinns 15y ago
All features are useful to some subset of the user base. I'm just trying to help compile a list going the other way of things Dropbox does and Gdrive doesn't. It is up to others to determine how much or little they matter. That the list is so short indicates just how competitive the gdrive offering is. I've never encountered anything that reliably reads my handwriting, and that includes my brain!
- patrickk 15y ago
  "All features are useful to some subset of the user base." Of course, I didn't mean to be nitpicking, I'm coming from the point of view of thinking about what it would take to move the dials for Google given the scale they operate at. Going after an OS with a minuscule market share and command line stuff wouldn't do much to steal market share from Dropbox, SkyDrive, Box.net et al. A real differentiator IMO is the way in which Dropbox seems native - it's so deeply embedded in the OS, whether you use Windows or Mac (I use both, one at home and one at work, the experience is great on both). "....Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple's radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple's file system so that his startup's logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1107/best-companies-11-drew-houston-steve-jobs-ferdowsi-dropbox-barret.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1107/best-companies-11-dre... I don't think Gdrive will - or want to - replicate this experience. They want to keep the 'big G' branding separate from Windows or OS X, and manage files in a browser instead.

EvilTerran 15y ago

OCR doesn't mean handwriting recognition, though... handwriting's a heck of a lot harder than print.

patrickk 15y ago
I was wondering about that as I was typing...damn that would be cool to have. If lots of people's handwriting was scanned in and used as a training dataset, that could be a way to do it on Google scale - like what they did with Google voice, training it for all different accents.
robryan 15y ago
Google are probably best placed to pull it off though with recaptcha.
tomkarlo 15y ago
Actually, Evernote's OCR does handwriting, and at least for me, does it pretty well. It's not going to give you a transcription, but it's good enough that the doc will show up if you're searching for it.
- evgen 15y ago
  That is probably because the Evernote founders were the team that developed the CalliGrapher cursive recognition engine which was used by the Apple Newton back in the day.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    Maybe, but it seems to me that for search (especially with stemming / misspelling coverage) you need a much lower OCR accuracy than for converting into text. Like maybe 95% vs 99.5% - you can have an order of magnitude more errors and search would still work fine.

archivator 15y ago

Yes, well, that was Evernote's promise, too. Doesn't quite work unless you write in this extremely separated neat handwriting that no one taking notes could possibly be writing in :) Cursive (the way most people outside the States write) is straight out.

rogerbinns 15y ago

All features are useful to some subset of the user base. I'm just trying to help compile a list going the other way of things Dropbox does and Gdrive doesn't. It is up to others to determine how much or little they matter. That the list is so short indicates just how competitive the gdrive offering is. I've never encountered anything that reliably reads my handwriting, and that includes my brain!

patrickk 15y ago
"All features are useful to some subset of the user base." Of course, I didn't mean to be nitpicking, I'm coming from the point of view of thinking about what it would take to move the dials for Google given the scale they operate at. Going after an OS with a minuscule market share and command line stuff wouldn't do much to steal market share from Dropbox, SkyDrive, Box.net et al. A real differentiator IMO is the way in which Dropbox seems native - it's so deeply embedded in the OS, whether you use Windows or Mac (I use both, one at home and one at work, the experience is great on both). "....Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple's radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple's file system so that his startup's logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that." http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1107/best-companies-11-drew-houston-steve-jobs-ferdowsi-dropbox-barret.html http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1107/best-companies-11-dre... I don't think Gdrive will - or want to - replicate this experience. They want to keep the 'big G' branding separate from Windows or OS X, and manage files in a browser instead.