AI glossary · AI basics
Optical character recognition (OCR)
Optical character recognition (OCR) is technology that reads text in images or scanned documents and turns it into editable, searchable text.
Also called text recognition
In more detail
OCR is a computer vision task. Older OCR needed clean, printed text; AI-based OCR can read handwriting, photos taken at an angle and complex layouts like receipts and forms.
Many multimodal chatbots can now read text in a photo you upload, which is OCR built into a bigger model.
Example
Pointing your phone camera at a sign to copy or translate its text uses OCR.
Related terms
Computer visionComputer vision is the field of AI that lets computers understand images and video, such as recognising objects, faces or text in a photo.Multimodal AIMultimodal AI can understand or create more than one type of content, such as text, images, audio and video, in the same conversation.
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