Optical character recognition or OCR technology allows us to convert printed, scanned, or handwritten documents into searchable digital text files. While there is no doubt that OCR software is crucial for reducing the unnecessary burden of manual data-entry tasks, the need for choosing the right kind of software cannot be overlooked.
Functionality, output quality, and accuracy are important parameters to judge the utility of a particular OCR software. Since there is a lot more to the process of choosing the right OCR software for your business, we decided to prepare a guide that can help you finalize a suitable OCR software. Also, we prepared a list of the 5 Best OCR Software available in the market today. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Features to Look-out For in An OCR Software
When searching for the best text recognition software, you should always look out for these features:
Adjustable Selection Feature
The adjustable selection feature is important because it enables users to scan selective parts of a document. Sometimes, only specific portions written or printed in documents need to be updated on portals. Thus, for all such requirements, an Adjustable Selection Feature becomes handy.
Search Options
Search options in OCR software are important to prevent errors in the final digitized text. With search options, the OCR software can look out for features corresponding to each character and compare them with a standard or custom dictionary. This way, an error detection mechanism comes into the picture with the help of standard search options.
Formatted Outputs
While the primary reason for using OCR software is to convert handwritten or printed text into digital forms, sometimes it becomes important to preserve the original formatting as well. For this reason, an OCR software that is capable of reproducing the original format after conversion can be a beneficial tool.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has completely transformed OCR’s functioning. AI enables OCR to go beyond just text detection and extraction to interpretation of its meaning. This interpretation happens based on the context around every word. All visual and textual cues act as the context information which is used by machine learning models to interpret the meaning of every word. AI has allowed OCR to develop self-learning capabilities, and function without requiring templates of any sort for the interpretation.
With deep learning, computer vision, and other such technologies coming up, OCR has become much more efficient. Thus, choosing an AI-based OCR software will be the most sensible decision.
5 Best OCR Software
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
For the cost at which it is available, the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is certainly one of the finest OCR software in the market. It provides options for editing and saving changes to the document after scanning. Moreover, with Adobe Reader, the functionality of the software can be increased manifold. Overall, with robust basic functions and free allowance for editing, the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is a useful software to have.
What Could Have Been Better
The PDFs markup function being complex and difficult to understand is certainly a problem area for the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC users. The process to change the file type is a bit slow. The file size is usually very large and has to be compressed through external sources for efficient storage.
Readiris
Readiris has been in the market for quite some time now and has exceptional abilities for supporting the editing of PDF format files. It is one of the best free OCR software. The efficient printer plug-in enables this OCR software to convert text from any web page document, and store it in the form of a regular PDF file. The software also has features of cloud integration. Hence, after scanning and conversion, data can be stored on cloud storage platforms like Google Drive.
What Could Have Been Better
The software does not provide enough options for plain text documents. Managing the formatting of lines can be difficult at times. The software allows you to save the digitized text in a file but does not have any option to copy the data to the clipboard.
SimpleOCR
With its regular scanning and conversion act being flawless, the software provides minor additional features, which work wonders as well. These include a thoughtful spell check feature that prevents spelling errors in the machine-encoded text. The format retention feature is a very accurate approach for text conversion, especially for those people who direly need the original formatting in the output.
Developers prefer SimpleOCR because it comes with a free OCR SDK that allows them to integrate this software with their applications, free of cost. The software allows vertical text recognition and also Identifies tables and spreadsheets in documents.
What Could Have Been Better
The software allows us to save the converted text directly into a PDF file but does not enable the user to copy and paste the digitised text as it is. There are also frequent reports of errors in conversion for handwritten documents. Inconsistencies exist whenever the digitised text is extracted from such documents.
ABBYY FineReader
Some experts regard the ABBYY FineReader as the highest quality OCR software available in the market today. The software has a keyboard-friendly OCR editor, which allows users to edit the digitised text with their regular keyboards as well. Users can export the data and save it in a variety of file formats. The interface of this software is extremely clear, and it provides the option for document comparisons too. So, ABBYY FineReader OCR software enables the extraction of useful and relevant data.
What Could Have Been Better
Unlike many other OCR software which does not even have half the number of features compared to the ABBYY FineReader, this software does not have a full-text indexing feature. This eventually makes searchability a big problem, as it takes a lot of time to complete a text scan/search in the converted document.
KlearStack OCR
The KlearStack OCR software is backed by Artificial intelligence which allows it to possess interpretation and self-learning abilities. AI makes it capable of accounting for errors and correcting them. It not just scans data and converts it accurately, it also comprehends the data for error detection.
Machine learning models have been put into place for developing the KlearStack OCR software. AI allows the software to interpret the converted data into relevant fields as and when required. More importantly, the software is capable of extracting data from handwritten, printed, or scanned documents without requiring them to be present in a set format/template.
KlearStack’s AI-driven OCR has already enabled hundreds of users to experience Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Overall, this AI-based tool is one of the best OCR software that can eliminate the need for redundant manual data-entry work forever.
