this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
1300 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59575 readers
4107 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's built by Google, but it's open source, and is probably the best optical character recognition by far. It's one pip/pipx installation away and I find it pretty useful on occasion. Same as WhisperAI by by OpenAI. Fully open source and one pip/pipx command away, probably close to the best audio transcription there is as well.
Not sure either count as AI, at least not AI chatbot kind of AI more like more simple algorithms, but they're great in the sense it's just another program but a very useful tool. Not some baked in copilot kind of deal
The algorithm is exactly the same as the chat bot, only the underlying data is different. Yes, they are all deep neural networks
I've actually just been working with OCR this week, trying to capture data off of the screen of a stupid proprietary Schneider device as that's the only way to get at it.
Long story short Tesseract stinks at this task.
The Chinese designed PaddleOCR seems significantly superior as it runs a more modern neural net and requires a lot less preprocessing. I would class it as more of a "full service AI" and not just a simple recognition system like Tesseract, it can correct for skew and do its own normalization and thresholding internally while Tesseract wants a perfect boolean raster fed to it.
Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is a lot higher due to trying to understand their text vomit website and the fact that it seems prone to random segfaulting.