Monday, January 14, 2008

Qipit - Online OCR Scanning For Free

If you've ever come across a piece of written text and thought "I'd like a copy of that" but the thought of having to copy it by hand is a real put off. Now, if you have a mobile phone with a camera or a portable digital camera, then all you have to do is take a shot of whatever it is you want copied and then send it via e-mail or MMS to Qipit.

Qipit
Qipit will take your photograph, whatever it may be, and scan it to PDF for you. Just think of it, hand-written notes, the contents of whiteboards, text documents, lecture notes, etc. and all transferred to text for you for free.

Qipit will then e-mail or fax the resultant PDF to your desired recipients so it could be a useful means of sharing with others. They'll even store your scanned docs online and you can then publish those on your web site or blog. You don't even have to send the image to them as you can just log-in on the site and upload images directly.

With the proliferation of mobile phones with built-in cameras and the ever-dropping price of digital cameras bringing mobile photography further into the reach of most people's pockets, then this could prove to be a very useful service.

8 comments:

Jason said...

I'm sorry, but that is *not* OCR.

Allan Ogg said...

Wikipedia defines OCR as "the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text."

Sounds exactly like what Qipit is offering to me. Okay it's not captured from a scanner but from a camera but that's a trivial difference - they're both optical devices.

Anonymous said...

it's not ocr if it's an image and not in an editable text.

Allan Ogg said...

Ah, right! I see what's wrong with the post description now. I made the incorrect assumption that the text would be OCR'd into the PDF, which would've made sense for them to do.
Apologies to everyone!

Anonymous said...

Nope. Unfortunately, it doesn't do OCR and the text is not editable, the image remains an image embedded (and edited/improved)in a PDF file.

Sarab said...

Well it's half way there. You can then convert the PDF into an editable format.

There's a service called OCR Terminal that lets you do that - www.ocrterminal.com

Mobile phone images often have a poor resolution though. So I guess the OCR accuracy will depend upon whether Qipit can clean or enhance the images.

Anonymous said...

www.free-ocr.com is another service to convert it to text.

Admin said...

So far I’ve found OCRconvert.com the best online optical character recognition service, they have no limit on the number of files that you can convert also their conversion has so far been very accurate for me, may be its because I only convert files in English language. But that works well.