Whether it's auto-extracting information from a scanned receipt for an expense report or translating a foreign language using your phone's camera, optical character recognition (OCR) technology can seem mesmerizing. And while it seems miraculous that we have computers that can digitize analog text with a degree of accuracy, the reality is that the accuracy we have come to expect falls short of what's possible. And that's because, despite the perception of OCR as an extraordinary leap forward, it's actually pretty old-fashioned and limited, largely because it's run by an oligopoly that's holding back further innovation. OCR's precursor was invented over 100 years ago in Birmingham, England by the scientist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe. Wanting to help blind people "read" text, d'Albe built a device, the Optophone, that used photo sensors to detect black print and convert it into sounds.

Huawei's Honor subsidiary today launched a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered app called PocketVision, which is designed to help those with visual impairments read documents, menus, and text using their smartphone camera. The PocketVision app, which was unveiled today at the annual IFA conference in Berlin, was developed in conjunction with Eyecoming, a Chinese social technology company specializing in visual impairments. According to Census Bureau data, roughly 20% of people in the U.S alone have a disability, more than half of whom report a "severe" disability. This figure is roughly consistent with other countries around the world, too. And it's against that backdrop that Huawei's Honor offshoot is launching the PocketVision app.

This particular report intends to offer business leaders of the financial area with a concept of what they are able to presently expect from AI in the business of theirs. We wish this report allows business leaders in finance to garner insights they are able to confidently relay to the executive teams of theirs so they are able to make educated choices when thinking about AI adoption. At the minimum, we wish the article decreases the time industry leaders in finance invest researching AI businesses they might wish to work with. Leverton is a Berlin-based business with 112 employees. The company provides a software program which it says could help financial institutions and banks extract as well as access info from the contracts of theirs and leases using optical character recognition (Deep learning and ocr). Leverton claims computer users can install the software of theirs on enterprise computers and publish a zip file with the appropriate leases or maybe contracts that have to be abstracted into the product. Leverton's software program comes pre-made with regular formats for particular kinds of documents, like credit agreement, mortgage documents, and loan agreements.

Google LLC today updated its Cloud Text-to-Speech service with new languages and voices in order to make it useful to more of its customers. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is intended to help companies develop better conversational interfaces for the services they supply. It works by transforming written text into artificial speech that's spoken in realistic human voices. With the service, Google is targeting three main markets: voice response systems for call centers; "internet of things" products such as car infotainment systems, TVs and robots; and applications such as podcasts and audiobooks, which convert text into speech. In a blog post, Google product manager Dan Aharon said Cloud Text-to-Speech is getting 12 new languages or variants, including Czech, English (India), Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Mandarin Chinese (China), Modern Standard Arabic and Vietnamese.

A yearbook is a type of a book published annually to record, highlight, and commemorate the past year of a school. Our team at MyHeritage took on a complex project: extracting individual pictures, names, and ages from hundreds of thousands of yearbooks, structuring the data, and creating a searchable index that covers the majority of US schools between the years 1890–1979 -- more than 290 million individuals. In this article I'll describe what problems we encountered during this project and how we solved them. First of all, let me explain why we needed to tackle this challenge. MyHeritage is a genealogy platform that provides access to almost 10 billion historical records.

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) adopts the AI definition found in the government's industrial strategy white paper – Industrial Strategy: building a Britain fit for the future, Department for Business, Energy and Industry Strategy, November 2017 "Technologies with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence" This definition includes everything from the simplest application of AI, which relies on making decisions based on static, predefined rules and parameter checking – e.g. if x, then do y – as well as simple'yes' or'no' decision trees, right through to the dynamic complex'learning (or evolving)' algorithms which continuously review incoming data, find patterns and adapt existing algorithms (and so, 'learn'). The rise of AI is sometimes represented as a threatening new development – but many, now mundane, functions were once seen as awe-inspiring new AI developments! Everyday examples of functionality previously, but no longer, considered as AI include voice-to-text transcription – now available on any smartphone, the digitising of scanned documents through handwriting recognition or optical character recognition and spam filtering. Like it or not, health tech is being embraced at the highest NHS and government levels. Speaking at a digital health conference this summer – Unlocking the promise of digital health – Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, pledged to consider reimbursement reforms to the NHS tariff and other payment systems to incentivise the uptake of AI technologies across the health system.

It's time for business owners to leverage technology to take care of the routine back-office tasks? How exactly do they do that? Through OCR (optical character recognition) and machine learning Small business technology expert and CPA, Gene Marks explains what this means for small business owners doing manual activities like bookkeeping & accounting. The question now is, what will you do with your spare time? Check out OCR and machine learning by starting a free trial over at www.receipt-bank.com/us/for-business/

Many gamers around the world love to play classic games such as Elder Scrolls, Super Mario and Metal Gear but one thing about older games, like ones made in the 1990s, is that they can lack localisations for each region. As well as that, some games are released exclusively in specific regions, so Japanese exclusives will only be made in Japanese. An example of this is Mother 3 that was released only in Japan after the highly acclaimed Mother 2 (Earthbound) that had a worldwide release. This meant that the fans had to translate the Japanese text if they wanted to know what was going on. RetroArch is a popular open-source gaming emulator where you can play classic games from consoles like the Gamecube on your PC.

Google made a subtle announcement today on Twitter: it's in the process of rolling out new AI features for its Lens platform that will let you search your Google Photos library for text that appears within photos and screenshots. Then, you'll then be able to easily copy and paste that text into a note, document, or form. Both of the new features make use of a technique known as optical character recognition (OCR), with the copy/paste option building on Lens' existing ability to understand and pull out the text found within photos, be it a screenshot or a photo of a physical sign or document. According to 9to5Google, that feature is available now on some Android devices, although it does not appear to be active quite yet on iOS. You may already be able to search your photos for text using Google Photos on the web.