Google Adds OCR To PDF and Images

Kilrah_il writes "Now you have the option to OCR every PDF and image you upload to Google Docs. 'When you upload files to Google Docs, you'll notice a new option that tells Google to convert the text from PDF and image files to Google Docs documents. ... I've tried to convert an excerpt from the book Rework and the result wasn't great. About 10% of the text has been incorrectly converted and the formatting hasn't been preserved.'"

Comments

F1r5t p0st?

[Chrisq]

F1r5t p0st? (OCR's by Google)

Is there a "this translation is bad" option?

[AdmiralXyz]

I know with several services, like Google Voice, they had a link or checkbox to indicate that "this transcription is lousy, I can do better" with an option to do so, which was presumably sent back to improve the service. It really seemed to work, too, the quality of Google Voice's voicemail-to-text transcriptions started off horrible, and has since become awesome. Same goes for the built-in speech-to-text in Android. If Google includes something like that here to tune whatever machine learning algos they're using, I have no doubt it will rapidly progress to a usable state.

Doesn't have to be perfect

[clone53421]

They really should hide the text underneath the actual scanned image, though, so that what you're actually looking at is the real page, but searchable. That takes care of the issue with layout, and since you aren't actually trying to read the garbled text, although 10% is still a rather high error rate it won't matter as much because you'll only notice it if you're trying to copy-and-paste or you might search for something and miss a few of the hits because it was incorrectly OCR'd. Not a huge deal.