Have you ever header of Optical Character Recognition. OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text, usually captured by a scanner, into machine-editable text. Google introduced a free OCR feature in Google Docs. Like any other OCR (optical character recognition) tool, this cloud-based service extracts text from images and then places it in your typical editable text-based document.

Not officially implemented, but Google Docs’ OCR API is still available for use. The tool is able to analyze JPG, GIF, and PNG image files that are 10MB in size or smaller. Google cites a couple other limitations, suggesting that images must be a fairly high resolution with characters about 10 pixels in height.

Assuming your image meets the ideal conditions, the OCR operation will take about 15 seconds for a 500KB file and 40 seconds for a 2MB file. While all of this might seem impressive but Web-based OCR services are not entirely new. Google’s solution is pretty handy, especially if you’re already an avid Google Docs user, but services like OnlineOCR, FineReaderOnline, Free-ORC and OCRTerminal offer additional features. Some offer wider language support, file type import and exports, and others are simply less restrictive with the file size. Google definitely have to provide all those features to compete in market.

There are also numerous ways to OCR for free on your desktop. Traditional OCR desktop software like OmniPage obviously come at a cost, but if you are looking for a more definitive desktop based OCR solution you may have one already without knowing it. Microsoft Office’s Onenote 2007 comes with a simple OCR function that can be activated by right-clicking on an image and selecting “Copy Text from Picture”. Also, if you look within Office’s program menu, you will find Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Document Imaging, which also works albeit with certain limitations. But as the world is moving fast towards Cloud-Computing and ease to mobility the web based OCR are the more preferred solution then desktop softwares.

Source: TechSpot