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Ask HN: Is there no good OCR available?
I'm wondering if tools like Tesseract are still the open-source (and offline) gold standard. There are, in the meantime, document intelligence services from all large cloud providers, but there is still not really a usable AI model that is capable of doing good OCR (image, not necessarily scans -> text). Do you know any active projects or resources in that field?
- solardev 2y ago(Edit: Nevermind, sorry. I misread your question. I think you're mainly interested in free offline apps.) Does it have to be an "AI" model in the modern usage of it (LLMs, etc.?) In the past, I found Google's Cloud Vision API to be pretty good for this sort of thing (images in text): https://cloud.google.com/vision?hl=en#demo https://cloud.google.com/vision?hl=en#demo AFAIK Tesseract was never state of the art, it was just free and cheap. The commercial offerings (in my limited experience) were usually much more accurate.
- verdverm 2y agoSecond Google's offering which can reasonably read my chicken scratch
- latexr 2y agoApple’s operating systems have been doing stellar OCR since 2019. When the feature was announced I was uninterested, but now I’m surprised how much I use it. It works without any extra work in Preview, Safari, and other apps. You can call it programatically via Shortcuts or the Vision APIs. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing-text-in-images https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing...