So maybe you have some insight into what is OCR and what are the advantages of OCR, but you would like to have more. Well, you came to the right place.

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, as it’s lesser known, has been around in one form or another for about 20 years, but has been getting more and more attention of late. This is mainly due to the greatly improved accuracy rates.

Define OCR is a computer process that can read and translate the characters you see in a flat document, such as a PDF or JPG file, and extract that data into a usable, readable format for the computer and, of course, yourself. For simplicity, it extracts text data it reads from documents and makes it searchable or copy/paste/editable.

OCR is often used by document scanning companies that convert large amounts of documents on a daily basis to businesses large and small that want to turn their document collection into a paperless archive. The problem with going paperless is that without OCR, digital documents are just flat files with no means to search or find important information within them. This is what makes OCR a popular choice during this process. OCR is also used by those who want to convert physical books and magazines into digital files.

In addition to being very useful, OCR is also a relatively inexpensive process to complete as it is, for the most part, an automated process that can be processed by the computer software being used.

OCR software is commercially available in a variety of price ranges and with different results. Cheaper software tends to have less successful OCR engines and therefore the accuracy is not as good and the OCR advantages are less. There are also an increasing number of mobile apps on the Android and iOS platforms that allow users to scan and OCR files from their mobile phones, but the quality of not only the scans but also the OCR tends to be terrible with these as of of the current date.

Professional OCR providers and document scanning companies tend to use very expensive and accurate software or develop their own, a very expensive process but one that can achieve great results if they can deliver a high accuracy rate. Today’s accurate numbers, typically from professional companies, tend to be 75-98% accurate, which is certainly some of the best ever. Most documents that are clean and not damaged or excessively yellowed tend to have a very high accuracy rating, since most OCR engines can read standard fonts from the last two hundred years. However, all this does not make OCR an expensive process.

Apart from those already explained, the advantages of OCR can include a great improvement in efficiency due to the fact that documents can be searched instead of having to look at physical paper documents. This in turn saves time and of course money and one of the other advantages of OCR is that it is known to boost staff morale as their work process is more streamlined and easy to handle.