How to Develop OCR Scanning Mobile App

Now it’s easier to turn your smartphone into a document scanner with  (OCR), which will convert your scanned documents from your phone camera or album into a regular text.

A scanner is a pretty useful tool that brings together physical & digital world, though it does have a downside, i.e. they are usually not portable. However, now you have your smartphone to your rescue as it has simplified yet another function which happens to be immensely useful for businesses, like scanning by using a scan app, termed as.

These apps convert scanned images to text, and the converted text is then in the word format that can be printed or saved as a word file. There are myriad of OCR scanner apps available out there in the market that can be utilized to convert your bills, warranty cards, documents or even hard copy books into digital format.

This way, OCR technology is a simple way to convert scanned images of a text page into a word time quite instantly, sans the hassle to type the whole content down again.

Let’s understand this concept in depth:

What is Optical Character Recognition?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is actually referred to the procedure of automatically recognizing from an image, characters or symbols that belong to a specified alphabet.

Once the text of the image has been identified, it can be used to:

• Save it to storage.
• Process or edit it.
• Translate it into other language.

The prominence enjoyed by smartphones and that combined with even better cameras has resulted in an increased usage of this kind of recognition technique and a new category of mobile apps utilizing them.

Why businesses need OCR technology?

If you are constantly surrounded by documents on a day-to-day, then it is very likely that an OCR app is just right for you.

When the written work is being produced, there are actually a number of ways to cut down on the amount that needs to be typed. This means that this precious time can rather be utilized on other crucial tasks by finding ways to get it all written down. You must be already thinking of the latest ‘Speech Text’ software or other amazing online translation services. But, we often overlook OCR, which is a great way to transfer text from physical sources directly to a digital document. You can easily find numerous  available out there for desktop & mobile, for both iOS & Android.

These apps vary in terms of price, but each of the app service has its own amazing features.

What are the Benefits of OCR mobile app?

As per a report by Transparency Market Research says, it is expected that the global document imaging market is going to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 13.8% to $153.05 billion, between the period of 2017 to 2015.

Today, with more and more businesses integrating smartphones & tablets into their workflow, it has become essential to have a scanner app in these devices. By having a scanner app in place, it gets users for the business to serve large sum of mobile customers. In fact, if we talk about the Android market, as per the Gartner report, the Android mobile OS represented 85.9% of the global market in the very first quarter of the year 2018.

It’s time to get organized &eliminate the manual processes with a scanner app.

A text scanning mobile app will offer your workforce a tool to get more organized and it will eliminate the time-consuming manual processes. An OCR scanner app is useful in capturing information on just everything from a document to a presentation, receipts, business cards, and a lot more.

A digitalized version of a document that is captured via a scanner app enables you to store data and also make it part of an automated system, so to get more organized. Now this will eliminate the manual processes, making the information accessible anytime and from anywhere.

Sign documents easily with an OCR app

Whenever you require to sign documents then and there, a scan app technology can prove to be useful as it allows to finalize deals without the need to mail the hard copies back & forth.

What are the crucial features of a Good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) App?

OCR apps are used mainly by two users:

• Admin: Back-end user, who is going to manage the users and entire features of the OCR app.

Features of User-Panel:

• Registration: This is the section that will be used by the app users to register into the app by using their social account credentials, or by registering via their email ID.
• Log-in: Once the user has registered into the app, they can then log-in to the app whenever desired to can even stay logged-in, by using their login credentials (username & password)
• Document Conversion into another format: The document can be converted by the users into another format. Like, they can input the document by upload from their phone or by scanning from their phone camera.
• Multiple input format: An OCR app need to be supported with PDF, image, text & word file. This way user can input any of the formats that are required to be converted.
• Conversion/OCR of Document into Text: This feature allows users to convert any format document into text. After conversion, user can manage (read/edit/delete) the text.
• Real-time File/Document Detection: This is quite a useful feature as when a user scans a document, the app will be able to detect it in real-time and will perform the actions according to the user activity.
• Usage of Filter: Once the document is scanned or uploaded, the user will be able to use the filter and apply them. The filters will comprise of colors and/or brightness and/or effects.
• Edit Document: Users can edit the documents and they will have the option to rotate, crop, & increase/decrease the document size.
• Convert into multiple languages: Once the user is done with upload & editing of the document, the system asks them for the language in which they want the text to be displayed in the output file. There is going to be a list of languages, from which the user can pick one.
• Multiple output formats: After the user has completed the upload, editing, and chosen language, he then needs to select the output format in which he wants the document to be converted. Like, the user can select text, word file & excel.
• Document/File Sharing: OCR apps must provide user sharing feature to the users, where the user is able to share the scanned/converted document with other users. They can share on Whatsapp, Dropbox, Gmail, etc.
• Multipage Document Support: In this section, the user will be able to scan multiple pages of a document at one-time and can also convert them.
• Real-time Document Filling: This is again an incredible feature where the user is facilitated to make changes in a document in real-time and can also convert them. Users can also add image/text/seal/signature in a document.
• Save & Manage Documents: User can save scanned/converted document in the app and he is allowed to carry the view/edit/download/delete actions on the saved documents.
• Manage Profile: Once a user is registered, he becomes a member of the app and will be able to manage his/her profile and can handle the account information and password.
• Notification: Users constantly receive alerts & notifications regarding the admin activities.

Features of Admin Panel:

• Login: This allows admin the access into the app using the log-in credentials.
• Dashboard: From this section, Admin will be able to monitor all users, document, most-used formats, and prominent languages along with document conversion.
• User-Management: From here, the admin will be able to manage all the users associated with the app.
• Language Management: From this section, the Admin manages the language of a document that will be picked by the user at the time of conversion.
• Document Format Management: From here, the Admin manages the entire of the document format being used in the app. He can add a new language & delete the existing one.
• Filter Category Management: Admin manages the categories for a filter that are used for document editing. There are several filters in each category.
• Filter Management: Here the admin manages all the filters associated with its category.
• Sharing Management: Sharing of Document information is saved in this section. From this section, admin can view all the users along with the sharing details and can manage them all.
• View Conversion: This action gives the admin the access to view & manage the file conversion. Each record offers information of converted documents along with the users.
• Reporting & Analytics: This section provides real-time reports, about users, document conversion, most-used format & filters.
• Notifications: Admin receives the notifications regarding the user activity.

Top 3 OCR Scanning Mobile Application:

PDF Scanner: Document Scan+OCR: This is one of the prominent OCR apps that continues to bag rave reviews from its audience owing to its easy-to-use functionality. The app, which is presently available for the Android users, imports images as well as PDF files and allows the users to add a personalized signature to documents. In terms of the size, it is just 5MB and is also free-to-download. This is a free app, hence there is no limit to the number of documents that can be scanned and there are no watermarks. This way your documents are ready instantly & good-to-go.

Online OCR: This app can be easily found online and is pretty simple and easy-to-use. The cool thing about this app is it supports 46 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese& Italian. The user simply needs to select & upload a file (limited to 5MB) and convert it to Excel, Word or Plain text-file. Once the user has registered into the app, he will have the option to buy more pages per hour, starting from £3.43 for 50-page to £276.39 for 50000-page. Post the registration, the user will be able to convert multi-page Excel, RTF, PDF documents and files sizing up to 100MB.

OmniPage Standard 18: Users, who are looking for an OCR app to use on a professional level and don’t mind spending extra, must go for this app, which costs £54.99. Lately, this app was rewarded as “Gold Award Winner” and bagged number 1 rank in toptenreviews.com list of OCR Software reviews & comparisons. Even though it is a little pricey as compared to other apps, still it is not the most expensive OCR mobile  app available in the market. For this price, its feature-list is pretty impressive with the ability to re-create paper or PDF documents to electronic files, word-searchable text files, processing a large number of documents, but most important is that each new file will exactly match the font, layout &color of the original document.

Google Docs: The ones who are already familiar with Google Document may like giving a try to OCR built into Google Drive. To attain the best results, set the document font to Times New Roman or Arial. You can also further improve the results by ensuring that the images scanned has an even-lighting & clear contrast between the colors. Images can be processed individually (GIF, PNG, & JPG files) or in multi-page PDF documents. Besides, it supports many languages ranging from Zulu, Yiddish, Finnish& Filipino. The document resolution must be at least 10-pixels in the heights, so to enable Google Docs to have a good change to text your text.

Cost to Develop an OCR mobile application

Development of a simple OCR app for a single-platform (iOS or Android) with basic features, appealing UX design & neat navigation will cost somewhere around $5000 to $7000. However, added functionality and features will take the cost up to $30,000.

Source

How to Develop OCR Scanner Mobile App – Complete Guide