Despite the fact there is no OCR engine to download, and the recognition is done locally, a network connection is not required.
Scanner even did an excellent job with a bag of potato chips, even after it was crumpled and uncrumpled several times. Entire pages of text voiced without a single mistake. Envelopes read the return addresses, postmarks and addresses.
The app is amazingly forgiving as far as camera position and lighting. Note: You can instruct Scanner to speak recognized text automatically in the Settings Menu.įrom the very first beta version of this app I tested, I was amazed by the speed and accuracy of the recognition. You are placed on the “Play” button, give a quick double tap and the text is spoken using either a purchased VD Reader voice or your chosen iOS voice. Double tap this button, the camera clicks, and the image is converted to text almost immediately. The app displays a real-time video image preview which is also the “Capture Image” button. The app installs quickly and easily, and displays with the icon name “Scanner” on your iOS device. Of course you don’t have to have VD Reader to enjoy the benefits of the new Voice Dream Scanner. VD Reader is also available for Android, but currently VD Scanner is iOS only.
Both can be purchased from the iOS App Store. To take advantage of this integration you’ll need both Voice Dream Reader and Voice Dream Scanner. You can now also add to your Voice Dream Reader Library not only from Dropbox, Google Drive, and other sources, including Bookshare, but using your device’s camera as well.
BEST TEXT SCANNER PDF
For example, if you load a protected PDF file into the app and open it, the Documents tab now offers a recognition feature. As to why he didn’t simply make it a new Reader feature, he smiles, “I do have a family to feed.”Ĭhen has been careful to integrate the new Voice Dream Scanner functionality into VD Reader, however. “I considered turning it into an in-app purchase, only there are a lot of schools that use Reader and they aren’t allowed to make in-app purchases,” he says. Instead of making OCR a Voice Dream Reader feature, Chen decided to incorporate his discovery into a separate app called Voice Dream Scanner. “Instead of using a single standard OCR engine, I combined the best aspects of each of these freely available tools, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results.” Last year, however, Chen began experimenting with Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI), called Vision Framework, that’s built into the latest iOS versions, along with Google’s Tesseract, TensorFlow Lite, and ML Kit. Either of these would have raised the price I have to charge too much for my value proposition.”
BEST TEXT SCANNER LICENSE
“The ones that do work well are quite expensive, either as a one-time license purchase with each app sold or with ongoing pay-by-the-use options. “There are some free, open source engines, but they don’t work well enough for my purposes,” he says. The hurdle Chen kept encountering was finding a useable OCR engine. “It would be useful for reading protected PDF’s and handouts and memos from school and work.” “I’ve been wanting to add OCR to Voice Dream Reader for a few years now,” says Chen. At the time, Apple’s VoiceOver cut and paste features and other block text manipulation capabilities were,shall we say, not quite what they are today? The innovative way Chen handled these functions made Voice Dream Writer equally useful to users with visual impairments. “Sometimes it’s easier to proofread your document by listening to it instead of simply rereading the text,” says Chen. No one was more surprised than me when I began receiving feedback from dyslexic and blind users describing how helpful Voice Dream Reader was for their needs and making some simple suggestions to improve the app’s accessibility.”Ĭhen’s second offering, Voice Dream Writer, was also directed at the mainstream market.
But according to Chen, “I just wanted to build a pocket reader I could use to store all my books and files so I could listen to them on the go. It works so well with VoiceOver and TalkBack, it’s hard to believe it wasn’t developed specifically for the access market. Spoiler alert-it will probably be the best $5.99 you’ll ever spend on a text recognition app!ĪccessWorld readers who use their phones to audibly read e-Pub books, PDFs or Bookshare titles are likely already familiar with Voice Dream Reader. Then we’ll take a look at the developer’s latest offering: Voice Dream Scanner. In this article we’ll start out with a brief conversation with Chen. There is a new player in the optical character recognition (OCR) space, and it comes from an old friend: Winston Chen, the developer of Voice Dream Reader and Voice Dream Writer, both of which we’ve reviewed in past issues of AccessWorld.
0 kommentar(er)
