Some of you might remember I shared Anyline Keyboard a few months ago; a scanner app that also lets you edit characters (if you're a bit confused, don't fret. More on this later). There are several of these apps already, but all have one common factor: OCR (here's a quick educational tech-letter for you)
Short for Optical Character Recognition, OCR is a technology that recognises text from images. For those who still can't quite understand what that means, let me use Anyline Keyboard as an example:
When you use an ordinary scanner app, all that happens is... your physical document is now digitalised. Can you edit that digital document? No. When I scan my passport, all I have now is a digital copy of my passport. That's it-- I can't edit the text on the scanned copy of my passport.
Some of you might have seen routers where the Wi-Fi passwords are printed on the back (they tend to be quite long and complex). If you use an app like Anyline Keyboard, you can scan that complicated string of characters. However... unlike a normal scanner where all you could do is view the Wi-Fi password you just scanned, OCR lets you treat this scan as ordinary text-- this means that you can actually edit whatever you just scanned.
Today's tech-letter elevates that concept from smartphones to smartcomputers.
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