Google’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in Google Drive that turns pictures of text into computer text is now expanded to over 200 different languages. Until now, company had offered this OCR feature for English language only.
“Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology aims to turn pictures of text into computer text that can be indexed, searched, and edited,” notes Google Research blog.
Users will need to first upload a scanned document in its current form (image or PDF) to Google Drive, and here they can right-click on the document in the Drive interface, and select Open with > Google Docs.
This automatically opens a Google document with the original image/ PDF followed by the extracted text, and users don’t even need to specify which language the document is in. For better control over the language, users can go over to Google Drive API.
Apart from the Google Drive Web interface, these OCR capabilities are also available in Google Drive for Android app as well.
“Currently, the OCR works best on cleanly scanned, high-resolution documents in the most commonly used typefaces. We are working to improve performance on poor quality scans and challenging text layouts,” adds blog.