The Future Of OCR Is Deep Learning

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.