Tuesday, November 1, 2011

OCR from iPhone

Last time I had to quote some text from a book, I laboriously typed it in. But next time I'll use OCR (optical character recognition) via my iPhone. There are several apps for it, I tried "Image To Text - OCR", and it works well, as well as any desktop OCR I've tried (OK, that's years ago).
This might be quite handy.
The photo, taken on my iPhone, was taken by the light of a desktop lamp, me hand-holding both the book and the camera/phone, so hardly the most ideal conditions, and the photo of course is not darn sharp. Yet there are only a few errors.


Here's the uncorrected text I got from the app:

RULE #2
More about
Protecting Your Wealth
The 1970s and 1980s brought us well-publicized stories of wealthy people who went broke or who lost most of what they had.
Businessman and politician John Connolly, renowned for his "insider's" ability to make money, one day found that he had to sell his most precious personal possessions at auction To the best of my knowledge, years later he still hadn't been able to return to his previous lifestyle. The Hunt Brothers inherited a fortune from their father's oil and food industry successes. But they lost hundreds of mil- lions of dollars speculating in silver and oil in the early 1980s, and I've seen no news that they've been able to earn it back Actress Doris Day lost most of what she had when she discovered that her late husband had squandered their money on bad investments. She was able to recover part of what had been lost, but only through a long series of exhausting laW- SUIt*
Of course, these people aren't you. And it s easy to beJieve you won't make the same mistakes they did. That's true You probably won't. But that doesn't mean you won't make any mistakes There are no books Wg«W to acquaint you with every possible hazard of trusting *°mr 


(The book is Fail-Safe Investing, recommended.)

2 comments:

Bruce said...

The Google Docs app for Android does OCR as well. I don't use it regularly but it did work once for me. It might be fun to try on the Galaxy Tab.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Aha.
I've virtually never worked with Google Docs. (Except I think My Writing Spot uses it for the storage.)