Optical Character Recognition: How text in a picture becomes usable
In 2008 a small company called Evernote made a big impact on the note taking industry.
I remember installing Evernote. I would snap pictures of things I needed to remember. Then I would save them to my Evernote account.
I remember this because Evernote introduced me to Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Because Evernote had OCR, I was able to search my Evernote account to find relevant text in the photos saved to my account. Evernote was saving me time. I didn’t need to type my notes.
Instead, I just took a photo of it and OCR was able to find the photo.
OCR is the technology allowing computers to scan the contents of photos for text.
I was surprised by someone this week didn’t know OCR existed so I wanted to share more with you.
This tech allows computers to get the text content of a photo and covert it to language the computer understands. Like the example of Evernote above you can use it to search for text in photos. The best part is you can use it to copy from and paste to a page. The phone operating systems even allow you to save calendar dates, and make phone calls straight from the pictures.
