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Where Did Affordable OCR Go?
Goeland86 asks: "Has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) died down? Where have all the magical programs that translate your handwriting to office compatible files gone? Most of the windows programs nowadays are either expensive (ReadIris Pro 9 about $400) and not that many OSS projects for OCR have released a recent update (Kognition was last updated on July 17th 2003 according to Freshmeat). Has everyone already scanned/translated all of their paper files? Has OCR outlived its use, or is it just a fancy technology that hit a dead end in terms of the market? Have Slashdot readers used it? If so, are you still using it? If not, why?"
It seems to have just fallen into a middle-market that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, anymore, either documents are handled completely digitally, or just scanned and translated into PDFs or the like. There just doesn't seem to be a need, at least a large enough one to merit attention.
OCR was a good idea when Hard drive capacity was less fantastic then it is today. The idea of taking a page of handwritten text, and scanning it magically into a supersmall text file was attractive. But OCR wasn't terribly accurate, and to make it so would require quite a bit of R&D. All of a sudden software houses need to hire handwriting analysts.
.jpg".
In the meantime, Harddrive capacity grew, and all of a sudden, the difference between a 4k text file and a 35k jpg became negligable. The only real benefit OCR offered was the ability to spellcheck, search for words within the document. Given that OCR was prone to creating nonsensical non-words, as well as changing a word like "which" into "mitch", even these benefits became less frequently used.
I'm convinced the most common phrase associated with OCR programs is "eh, just save it as a
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Ok, everyone laugh at me. I say the paperless office killled OCR. :-) Yeah, that thing that would supposedly never happen? That is the butt of office jokes? Well, I think it did and nobody noticed.
How much paper do you see around you that wasn't already computer generated? Paper still exists as a convenient thing to hang up, or to take to a meeting, but it is always printed. There's no point in complex OCR packages when people can just get the soft copy.
There is very little left to scan. large organizations that are moving from paper to electronic systems aldready keyed the data in manually and don't need the technology anymore. The internet killed the need for faxes, which were unreadable anyway. What's left to OCR?
With that said, my bank doesn't offer online statements, so I scan them every month. But I don't bother to OCR them. My credit card company just started, so that will leave me with one sheet of paper every month.