by Dan Moren
Dropbox adding OCR capabilities to scans
Detailed blog post by Dropbox’s Brad Neuberg about the addition of optical character recognition (OCR) to Dropbox’s scanning feature. This will allow Dropbox to recognize text in scans you make with its apps, meaning you can search for text that appears inside a scan or copy and paste text out of it. It’s something that seems like it should be simple, but this post shines a lot on what makes this such a hard problem.
I’d love to see this information exposed to Shortcuts somehow. I scan my expense receipts into Dropbox for logging later, and if it could pull out information like the date and amount of the expense, that would be incredibly powerful for the way I log that information. It’d also be great to see Apple add this kind of capability to Notes’s document scanning too.