The age of computers has been a whirlwind of changes—both good and bad. The internet, which to some people seems to like it has always been around, was actually only created in 1980. From then until now, the internet has changed the way we do almost everything. And it doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon.
In the past 20 years, we have seen many different innovations in technology, including cell phones and smartphones, tablets, and laptops, just to name a few. But there is one company that has had an impact on our lives that is even greater than all of these devices combined: OCR software.
What is OCR software?
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. OCR software converts scanned or photographed images into computer text. This means that you are able to scan an image of paper documents, journals, books, or whatever you want and create a digital copy. It has a lot of advantages:
You are able to store your documents in an electronic format, which means you can keep them for longer and access them easily whenever you want.
The text is searchable and editable, so if by any chance there is something wrong with it, you can fix it immediately.
OCR software, which combines hardware and software, transforms physical documents into text that computers can read. Text is copied or read using hardware, such as an optical scanner or dedicated circuit board, while software usually does advanced processing. The software can use artificial intelligence (AI) to implement more sophisticated intelligent character recognition (ICR) techniques, such as recognizing languages or handwriting styles.
(Optical Character Recognition) OCR Software — The Basics
OCR technology is already all around us, helping computers interpret the text on our screens and in our documents. It’s everywhere, but how many of us really know how it works?
When we open a Microsoft Word document, what do we see on screen? The content of the document? The actual letters and words are buried beneath a layer of formatting, but the computer doesn’t need to see them to display the text.
Instead, it can use OCR to extract text information from pixels on a page and make it instantly searchable or copy and paste. This process is both fast and accurate, which is why we take for granted that when we open a Word document, we can copy text from it into a search engine or an email message and reducing manual data entry of document content into other systems.
OCR technology has been around since the ’60s, but it’s come a long way from its early days of misreading even basic typography. These days, OCR programs can scan documents in dozens of languages and can recognize symbols like mathematical equations. But as great as they are already at recognizing letters and numbers, they haven’t yet reached that point where they can actually “read” text — if you’ve ever used one of those OCR programs, you know that even in the best-case scenario, it’s still a bit of a guessing game.
