The OCR Software Blog

Our free online OCR service launched today. What are the key advantages of this new online OCR service?

1. Fast (and no CAPTCHAs)

2. Better text recognition rate than any other free OCR online service.

Abbyy was the winner of our past Best Online OCR Review and Best OCR Software for Chinese review - but the text recognition of this new service matches or even beats Abbyy OCR. And (a9t9) OCR service clearly beats Google Docs’ built in OCR service. Of course, our little web service does not intend to match the full range these commercial offerings - but if all you need is to convert images to text, then try us out.

Don’t believe this? Then see the test data below.

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(Photo by NW / CC BY 2.0)

This last post in our Upwork vs Elance vs Freelancer.com series focuses on outsourcing mobile development projects. This experiment aims to answer two questions:

(1) On which outsourcing portal do you find the best mobile developers?

(2) And also: What is the recommended technical approach for cross-platform mobile development? Xamarin, Phonegap or creating a native application for each platform?
The Xamarin vs Phonegap vs Native question has already been  answered in many good developer blog posts (for example here), but just like the cited post, all of them focus on the technical merits of each approach. That is a valid. But assume your project, as many projects, can be implemented with all frameworks/approaches (like ours). Then it is time to look at the project from a different angle: For which technology do you find the most developers? [Hint: The answer will surprise you] The common wisdom is that there are more native iOS/Android developers than experienced Xamarin developers, and so it’s easier to hire people for native. But this turned out to be wrong.

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Update May 1, 2015: (a9t9) launched its very own free and open-source Online OCR service - try it out and let us know how it compares.
Think English language OCR is hard? Then try Chinese. This is what I did for this review. When I reviewed Online OCR services for English, there were 5 OCR surprises. Now I am back, looking at OCR software for Chinese characters.

Why is Chinese OCR difficult?

Why is Chinese OCR more difficult than, say, English or German document OCR?

Optical character recognition by itself is still hard. It is not a solved problem, at least not for the software available to end-users. The result of our English OCR benchmark have been mixed. But Chinese language OCR takes the challenge to another level. Here is why:

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One step closer to HAL 9000, the famous character and primary antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey:  Last week the journal Nature published a study in which researchers of the Google owned company Deep Mind report on  their progress in artificial intelligence.

From the Nature paper (emphasis mine):

We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games.

This was done using…

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Upwork, Elance and Freelancer.com provide on-demand access to more than 1 million technical workers – but how good are they for outsourcing  web development projects for a small web application? On which portal to do you find the best ASP.NET/Bootstrap experts in 2015? This post gives some hints.

As test project I created a specification for a prototype web application that I wanted to get done. The website allows you to upload documents and have them OCR’ed. For the user interface I decided on (Twitter) Bootstrap, for the back-end code on ASP.NET/C# - both are widely known technologies. The project offer was posted on the three major outsourcing portals.

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