What Are OCR Tools and How Do They Work?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools are web-based tools that turn images of printed documents and electronic formats like PDFs into readable, searchable, and editable files. They are easy to use and don’t require any special knowledge to use them. By using an OCR tool, you save a lot of time, money, and effort since you don’t have to manually rewrite all the information found on those files. These tools use OCR technology, which converts text from various types of physical and digital files into machine-readable data. Therefore, OCR tools can recognize text from images, photos, and printed or scanned documents and extract the same. The extracted text can then be used for various purposes, such as data entry. Database creation, or information indexing. Also, they can convert the extracted text into various file formats like CSV, XML, XLSX, etc.The Evolution of OCR Tools
Back in the 70s, when the OCR tools have first appeared, they weren’t nearly as sophisticated as those we have today. Many things have changed throughout the years, with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning taking over the OCR technology. Apart from these two technologies, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique has also been incorporated. This has allowed OCR tools to understand the context of the text being extracted. In addition, OCR tools nowadays can be used on documents of any format and non-standard ones. Thanks to all these advances and technologies incorporated in these tools, they can serve for much more than extracting text from printed and digital files. They can understand their meaning, detect frauds, and so on.Benefits of Using OCR Tools
Using OCR tools for extracting text from printed and digital files has numerous benefits for businesses, including:- Allows for easy access - Users can easily search for specific files using their personal information. Since the system uses OCR technology, all files can be searched by data like names, numbers, and addresses.
- Reduces time - OCR tools save a lot of time since they do all the hard work of manually rewriting or transcribing files.
- Improves files conversion and data usability - Using an OCR tool, you can easily edit and manage files as well as convert them from one file format to another.
- Reduces costs - OCR tools have low-cost processing, which saves your budget.
- Improves productivity - Since working with OCR reduces time, effort, and stress, it creates a more relaxed working environment, which results in greater productivity.
- Boosts speed - By extracting text from printed and digital documents and converting it into readable and editable data, OCR speeds up the process of data management.
- Increases accuracy and data usability - By having text extraction done by AI-powered and Machine-Learning-based OCR tools, the text is very accurate and ensures better data usability. The higher accuracy makes the content more valuable to clients and allows businesses to control data quality.
- Improves customer service and increases customer retention - By using OCR tools, you can serve your customers faster and more effectively. It’s because it converts all your data into a digital format that is easy to access. This not only improves customer service but also increases your customer retention.
How to Choose the Right OCR Tool for Your Business?
There are many OCR tools available on the market, but all of them are the same. They differ in their technology, features, and price. Also, not all of them match your business needs and requirements. So, how to choose the right OCR tool for your business? To do that, you need to look at the OCR tool that:- Works with standard and non-standard formats.
- Supports all languages or, at least, all commonly spoken languages.
- Is SaaS-based, not software that needs to be installed because those tools improve over time and offer users more features.
- Can detect handwritten text - not a must, but definitely a big plus.
- Isn’t template-based because they perform poorly.
- Matches your business needs - look at its features to see if it can do whatever you need.
- Matches your budget, but make sure you look at the total cost of the tool, not only the price of the product (one-time payment or monthly fee or completely free).
6 Best Online OCR Tools
Choosing which OCR tool works best for your business is totally up to you. However, to help you out with that, here we list the six best online OCR tools. Take a look at them… who knows, one of them might be the one for you.1. Online OCR
Online OCR Features
- Supports 46 recognition languages, among which are:
- The most spoken languages - English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Indonesian, and Russian.
- Popular languages - Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Finnish, and Greek.
- Lesser spoken languages - Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Catalan, Galician, Lithuanian, Macedonian, and Moldavian.
- Even dead languages like Esperanto.
- Supports various image formats, including PDF (all types, even multi-page PDFs), JPEG/JPG, PNG, BMP, PCX, GIF, and TIF/TIFF (Multipage TIFFs supported). In addition, ZIP files containing all these file formats can also be uploaded.
- Recommended image quality - 200-400 DPI
- Maximum input file size - 200 MB
- Supports various output formats, including Adobe PDF document, Microsoft Word document, Microsoft Excel document, RTF document, Text Plain.
- Supports conversion from PDF, JPG, BMP, TIFF, and GIF formats into DOCX, XLSX, and TXT.
Conversion Process
The conversion process of Online OCR is very simple and has three steps:➔ Upload your file.
➔ Choose your language and output format.
➔ Click the Convert button.
2. GorillaPDF Online OCR
GorillaPDF Online OCR Highlights
- No registration and login needed
- Unlimited convertsions
- Encrypted connection
- Automated file deleting
- Support 106 languages
- Drag-and-drop form
- 90% accuracry
- Up to 50 MB image size upload
- Waiting converting time is approximately 3 seconds per 1.6 MB image
- Download the output in a PDF file where you can copy the text
- Clean design
- Seamles user experience
- API-ready
Text Extraction Process
➔ Open the online OCR tool.
➔ Click on the "Browse" button, or drag and drop your PNG or JPG image.
➔ When loaded, click on "Convert" button.
➔ Download the PDF file with extracted text when finished.
3. NewOCR
NewOCR Features
- No registration needed
- Unlimited uploads
- High data security - all your files are removed from the server upon their conversion.
- Supports 122 languages (INCREDIBLE!)
- Multi-language recognition
- Mathematical equations recognition
- Multi-column text recognition
- Supports low-resolution images
- Supports poorly photographed and scanned pages
- Allows page rotation
- Area selection on a page
- Various ways to process and display the extracted text
- Supports various image formats, including PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP, PGM, PCX, PBM, JFIF, and PPM.
- Supports compressed files and multiple images in ZIP archive
- Supports multi-page documents, including PDF, TIFF, and DjVu
- Supports DOCX and ODT files with images
- Supports three output file formats, including DOC, PDF, and TXT
Text Extraction Process
Extracting text from images using NewOCR is pretty simple. To do it, you need to:➔ Click the Choose File button.
➔ Choose an image.
➔ Click the Preview button to access several additional options.
➔ Once done, click the blue OCR button to extract the text from the image.
➔ Download the extracted text in a format of your choice or send it to Google Docs.
4. OCR.Space
OCR.Space Features
- Great safety - no data is stored
- Supports 24 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, Swedish, and Turkish.
- Supports various input formats, including WEBP, PNG, JPG, and PDF.
- Supports two output formats: searchable PDF and JSON.
- File auto-rotation
- Receipt scanning
- Table recognition
- Auto-scaling
- Two OCR engines: engine 1 offers fast conversion and extraction and supports most languages; engine 2 is better for number and special character recognition.
- Supports multi-page documents
- Supports multi-column text
- Free and paid version
- Maximum input file size for the free version - 5 MB
- Free OCR API for automated OCR and multi-file processing.
- Doesn’t support handwritten documents, only printed or scanned.
- Two input options - upload a file or insert a link to an online available file.
Conversion/Text Extraction Process
➔ Upload a file or insert a link.
➔ Choose the language.
➔ Select the additional options: orientation detection and auto-rotation, receipt scanning or table recognition, auto-enlarge content.
➔ Select the type of output format: do you want just to extract text and show overlay, a searchable PDF with a visible text layer, or searchable PDF with an invisible layer.
➔ Select which OCR engine to use.
➔ Click the Start OCR! Button.
➔ If you have selected one of the two searchable PDF format options, you can choose to download the file or just show overlay.
5. Convertio
Convertio Features
- Supports 75 recognition languages;
- Supports various input formats, including PDF, JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, JP2, PBM, PPM, PCX, PGM, TGA, and WBMP.
- Supports various output formats, including DOC, DOCX, XLSX, PDF, PPT, CSV, EPUB, RTF, TXT, FB2, and DjVu.
- Supports over 300 formats
- Fast and easy to use
- Cloud-based conversions
- Offers custom settings per each type of conversion
- Great security - the uploaded files are deleted after 24 hours.
- Supports all devices and platforms.
Conversion Process
➔ Click the “Choose Files” button to upload a file or drag and drop the file you want to process.
➔ Select the language or two languages used in your file.
➔ Select the output file format.
➔ Choose whether you want to recognize all pages or specific ones.
➔ Click the download link that appears once the conversion is over.
➔ Save your file.
6. i2OCR
- Supports over 100 recognition languages
- Supports various input formats, including JPG, PNG, PPM, PBM, PGM, BMP, and TIFF.
- Supports several output formats, including DOC, DOCX, PDF, TXT, and HTML.
- Supports multiple uploads.
- Supports multi-column documents.
- Allows importing from a hard drive or from a URL.
- Various post-processing operations - editing, indexing, searching the file, etc.
- Side-by-side views of the source image and the extracted text to check for misrecognized words.
- High security - all files are deleted within an hour.
i2OCR Features
Text Extraction Process
➔ Choose the recognition language.
➔ Upload the file - image or a scanned file.
➔ Click the CAPTCHA checkbox.
➔ Click the red Extract Text button.