Free Text Recognition Software Mac

OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a sophisticated software technique that allows a computer to extract text from images. In the early days OCR software was pretty rough and unreliable. Now, with the tons of computing power on tap, it’s often the fastest way to convert text in an image into something you can edit with a word processor.

These ten applications offer different takes on the task of OCR, without a price tag and across multiple platforms. If you’ve been looking for a way to turn pictures into words, you’ll almost certainly find the best free ocr software you need below.

Easy Screen OCR (Windows, Mac, iOS & Android). Easy Screen OCR is a small, best free OCR software that relies on a cloud-based, Google-powered recognition engine. As you might expect, this means that you need to have an active internet connection for the software to work. Apr 24, 2020  Free speech recognition software for Windows, Mac, Android, or iOS - 1) Google Docs Typing, 2) WIndows 10 VOice Recognition, 3) Voice Finger, 4) e-Speaking, 5) Mac.

FreeOCR (Windows 10)

FreeOCR is a basic free OCR software that offers all the core functionality you’d want from this type of software. For starters, if you have a TWAIN scanner (which is basically all of them) you can directly scan and extract text from paper. Image imports work as you’d expect as well. This includes multi-page documents in TIFF and PDF format as well.

FreeOCR uses an Open Source engine originally developed by Hewlett Packard and eventually released by Google for everyone to use. It’s known as “Tesseract”. Tesseract has some neat features, but one of the most interesting is its automatic layout detection system. This means you don’t need to spend time tediously drawing rectangles around discrete blocks of text.

SimpleOCR (Windows 10)

SimpleOCR is a basic OCR package that can convert typed documents into text, directly from your scanner. The name, SimpleOCR, is quite literal in this case. If you have documents that exhibit any form of complexity, such as columns or that don’t have perfectly crisp scans, SimpleOCR can’t get the job done.

Of course, Simple Software is happy to sell you a more sophisticated solution for a few bucks, but if you just want to OCR some standard blocks of text, this is one option that won’t cost you a penny and is as simple to use as the name suggests. As a bonus, it supports handwriting recognition!

Easy Screen OCR (Windows, Mac, iOS & Android)

Easy Screen OCR is a small, best free OCR software that relies on a cloud-based, Google-powered recognition engine. As you might expect, this means that you need to have an active internet connection for the software to work. If that’s not an issue, you’ll find quite a useful tool here.

This OCR application is intended to extract text from screenshots, letting you copy text from websites or any other text that’s on-screen. What’s particularly cool about this is the support for more than 100 languages. If you want to translate (for example) Japanese text, you can simply take a screenshot and have Easy Screen OCR do it for. If this is something you need to do often, it also helps that you have the option to set custom hotkeys.

While this is not a traditional OCR application, there are plenty of workflows around these days that involve extracting text from the images you’re working with. Easy Screen OCR makes that task as easy as a few keystrokes.

Unfortunately the latest version of the software (1.4.2 and up) requires a subscription fee after 20 uses. However, older versions of the software are still free to use.

Capture2Text (Windows 10)

Capture2Text is an interesting little application with a narrow, but very useful function. It’s used to OCR text from what’s currently on your screen. You press a hotkey, select the zone of the screen you want to OCR and then it sends the result directly to the clipboard, so you can paste it into a word processor.

Capture2Text is a portable application, so you don’t need to install it. Just run the executable and you can use it on any Windows system from version 7 and up. The software is Open Source as well, so you can copy and modify it as you like, as long as you comply with the terms of the GNU license.

It’s not fancy by any means, but if you want to rapidly grab text from images that you are handling, this is a great piece of software to do it.

A9t9 (Windows 10)

If you’ve never ventured onto the Windows Store, you may be surprised to find that there are actually plenty of free and Open Source applications there. The a9t9 app is just such a gem and comes with no strings attached at all. There are no adverts and it promises pretty robust OCR performance.

A9t9 supports quite a long list of languages, although not as extensive as some of the other options on this list. If you’re a Windows 8.1 (or up) user who needs OCR right now and don’t want to spend any money, then simply click a single button on the Windows Store app and seconds later a9t9 will be processing your images into documents you can edit.

Adobe Scan (Android & iOS)

Adobe has an absolute ton of mobile apps out in the wild. Some are pretty great, while many seem to be little more than experiments. Adobe Scan falls into the former category. It’s a polished camera scanning and OCR application that will run on either Android or iOS. There’s no charge and you don’t need to be subscribed to any Adobe services.

Of course, the final document is a PDF, which you can only directly edit with a paid version of Acrobat, but copying the text over to a word processor of your choice is no hassle, if we’re being honest.

One of the best features of the Adobe OCR software is its ability to recognize handwriting. Of course, good quality handwriting will be better recognized. Don’t expect it to decipher something you can’t read yourself. Like your doctor’s prescription notes.

There are a few other reasons to try out Adobe Scan. The ability to automatically scan, OCR and contacts from a business card is very cool. In fact, if you spend a lot of time meeting people, it could save you a heck of a lot of time.

The app also has, as you’d expect from the creators of PhotoShop, a small set of touch-up tools. So you can clean up the images before trying to extract text from them.

Office Lens (Android & iOS)

When the first phones with built-in digital cameras came to market the quality on offer was truly awful. The resulting images weren’t really useful for anything and you certainly couldn’t make out fine detail such as text.

Today, the sophisticated cameras found on even budget models offer high-resolution images that are good enough to use as a replacement for a document scanner. For example, the Google Drive app lets you make some pretty good scans using nothing but your phone camera.

The Office Lens app by Microsoft not only lets you scan documents, it allows you to OCR them on the fly. So you could take a snap of someone’s business card and immediately have the text ready to copy into your contacts list.

Office Lens is a standalone application, but its functionality is being built into other MS Office apps as well, so if you’re already using those it may not be necessary to download this independent app. Then again, sometimes a focused, lightweight app is exactly what the doctor ordered.

English OCR (iOS)

English OCR is a free OCR app for iPhone and iPad that makes it pretty easy to quickly take a snap of a document and convert the text in the photo into a digital format. It’s released under an Open Source licence, but the developers use adverts to help carry the costs of developing and supporting the application.

There is a paid “Pro” version that has exactly the same functionality as the free edition. The only difference is that the Pro version removes all adverts. So if you are OK with a few ads, you don’t need to put any money down at all.

Reading Between The Lines

The promise of a paperless world has, so far, failed to materialize. Which means OCR technology will remain an important part of the bridge between the digital and analogue worlds.

Armed with the OCR apps above, you should never have to laboriously retype a document ever again and, best of all, they won’t cost you a cent.

Photo editing software for mac 2018. Some tools allow even more detailed adjustments; click the triangle next to Options to see everything the tool offers.You can toggle individual adjustments on and off by clicking the blue circle that appears next to each tool when it's expanded or when hover your pointer over it.If you want to apply the adjustments you make from one photo to another, just copy and paste them. Use sliders or the Auto button to easily adjust your photo — or dive deeper with detailed controls.Click the triangle next to each Adjust tool's name to show its controls.

macOS Catalina introduces Voice Control, a new way to fully control your Mac entirely with your voice. Voice Control uses the Siri speech-recognition engine to improve on the Enhanced Dictation feature available in earlier versions of macOS.1

How to turn on Voice Control

Computer

After upgrading to macOS Catalina, follow these steps to turn on Voice Control:

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  1. Choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, then click Accessibility.
  2. Click Voice Control in the sidebar.
  3. Select Enable Voice Control. When you turn on Voice Control for the first time, your Mac completes a one-time download from Apple.2
    Voice Control preferences

When Voice Control is enabled, you see an onscreen microphone representing the mic selected in Voice Control preferences.

To pause Voice Control and stop it from from listening, say ”Go to sleep” or click Sleep. To resume Voice Control, say or click ”Wake up.”

How to use Voice Control

Get to know Voice Control by reviewing the list of voice commands available to you: Say “Show commands” or ”Show me what I can say.” The list varies based on context, and you may discover variations not listed. To make it easier to know whether Voice Control heard your phrase as a command, you can select ”Play sound when command is recognized” in Voice Control preferences.

Basic navigation

Voice Control recognizes the names of many apps, labels, controls, and other onscreen items, so you can navigate by combining those names with certain commands. Here are some examples:

  • Open Pages: ”Open Pages.” Then create a new document: ”Click New Document.” Then choose one of the letter templates: 'Click Letter. Click Classic Letter.” Then save your document: ”Save document.”
  • Start a new message in Mail: ”Click New Message.” Then address it: ”John Appleseed.”
  • Turn on Dark Mode: ”Open System Preferences. Click General. Click Dark.” Then quit System Preferences: ”Quit System Preferences” or ”Close window.”
  • Restart your Mac: ”Click Apple menu. Click Restart” (or use the number overlay and say ”Click 8”).

You can also create your own voice commands.

Number overlays

Use number overlays to quickly interact with parts of the screen that Voice Control recognizes as clickable, such as menus, checkboxes, and buttons. To turn on number overlays, say ”Show numbers.” Then just say a number to click it.

Number overlays make it easy to interact with complex interfaces, such as web pages. For example, in your web browser you could say ”Search for Apple stores near me.” Then use the number overlay to choose one of the results: ”Show numbers. Click 64.” (If the name of the link is unique, you might also be able to click it without overlays by saying ”Click” and the name of the link.)

Voice Control automatically shows numbers in menus and wherever you need to distinguish between items that have the same name.


Grid overlays

Use grid overlays to interact with parts of the screen that don't have a control, or that Voice Control doesn't recognize as clickable.

Say “Show grid” to show a numbered grid on your screen, or ”Show window grid” to limit the grid to the active window. Say a grid number to subdivide that area of the grid, and repeat as needed to continue refining your selection.

To click the item behind a grid number, say ”Click” and the number. Or say ”Zoom” and the number to zoom in on that area of the grid, then automatically hide the grid. You can also use grid numbers to drag a selected item from one area of the grid to another: ”Drag 3 to 14.”

To hide grid numbers, say ”Hide numbers.” To hide both numbers and grid, say ”Hide grid.”

Dictation

When the cursor is in a document, email message, text message, or other text field, you can dictate continuously. Dictation converts your spoken words into text.

  • To enter a punctuation mark, symbol, or emoji, just speak its name, such as ”question mark” or ”percent sign” or ”happy emoji.” These may vary by language or dialect.
  • To move around and select text, you can use commands like ”Move up two sentences” or ”Move forward one paragraph” or ”Select previous word” or ”Select next paragraph.”
  • To format text, try ”Bold that” or ”Capitalize that,” for example. Say ”numeral” to format your next phrase as a number.
  • To delete text, you can choose from many delete commands. For example, say “delete that” and Voice Control knows to delete what you just typed. Or say ”Delete all” to delete everything and start over.

Voice Control understands contextual cues, so you can seamlessly transition between text dictation and commands. For example, to dictate and then send a birthday greeting in Messages, you could say ”Happy Birthday. Click Send.” Or to replace a phrase, say ”Replace I’m almost there with I just arrived.”

You can also create your own vocabulary for use with dictation.

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Create your own voice commands and vocabulary

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Create your own voice commands

  1. Open Voice Control preferences, such as by saying ”Open Voice Control preferences.”
  2. Click Commands or say ”Click Commands.” The complete list of all commands opens.
  3. To add a new command, click the add button (+) or say ”Click add.” Then configure these options to define the command:
    • When I say: Enter the word or phrase that you want to be able to speak to perform the action.
    • While using: Choose whether your Mac performs the action only when you're using a particular app.
    • Perform: Choose the action to perform. You can open a Finder item, open a URL, paste text, paste data from the clipboard, press a keyboard shortcut, select a menu item, or run an Automator workflow.
  4. Use the checkboxes to turn commands on or off. You can also select a command to find out whether other phrases work with that command. For example, “Undo that” works with several phrases, including “Undo this” and “Scratch that.”

To quickly add a new command, you can say ”Make this speakable.” Voice Control will help you configure the new command based on the context. For example, if you speak this command while a menu item is selected, Voice Control helps you make a command for choosing that menu item.

Create your own dictation vocabulary

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  1. Open Voice Control preferences, such as by saying ”Open Voice Control preferences.”
  2. Click Vocabulary, or say ”Click Vocabulary.”
  3. Click the add button (+) or say ”Click add.”
  4. Type a new word or phrase as you want it to be entered when spoken.

Learn more

  • For the best performance when using Voice Control with a Mac notebook computer and an external display, keep your notebook lid open or use an external microphone.
  • All audio processing for Voice Control happens on your device, so your personal data is always kept private.
  • Use Voice Control on your iPhone or iPod touch.
  • Learn more about accessibility features in Apple products.

1. Voice Control uses the Siri speech-recognition engine for U.S. English only. Other languages and dialects use the speech-recognition engine previously available with Enhanced Dictation.

2. If you're on a business or school network that uses a proxy server, Voice Control might not be able to download. Have your network administrator refer to the network ports used by Apple software products.