Paperwork is a lot simpler in the current times, thanks to the OCR software development. There are some tasks that require a hefty amount of paperwork, but now with the help of OCR app development, we can quickly scan and share documents with ease. This process saves you from a ton of hard work in collecting and filing that paperwork and allows you to share the relevant documents in a digital form with anyone, anytime. You can access those documents over and over without any hassle from anywhere on the planet.
OCR is the abbreviation for optical character recognition technology that simply converts your smartphone or tablet into a scanner and converts the scanned documents into a regular text. This app acts as a medium that binds the physical & digital worlds together. This could be the right time to develop an OCR app as numerous businesses are using them, and there is enough demand in the market for an OCR app development.
The massive popularity of these apps is their ability to convert scanned images into text; further, the user can print or save the converted text in word format and print it with the help of a printer. If you look at the market today, there are a bazillion of OCR scanner apps available that can convert your important documents, bills, books, etc., into a digital format that you can share. With the help of these document scanning apps, you can say goodbye to the hassle of typing the whole offline document to make it digital.
OCR software development doesn’t only help in converting the files, but it also converts different sets of documents of varying types such as PDFs, images, or files that save you all the trouble of conventional paperwork filing. With the development of technologies, these apps have also evolved and now can decipher myriad languages and symbols.
What’s An OCR Scanner APP and Its Importance in Businesses?
Optical character recognition (OCR) can be defined as converting documents and texts or handwritten or typed text that belongs to a specific set of an alphabet into machine-encoded language. The scanned text can be later edited, saved, and translated into various languages by the users. The evolution of the cameras in recent smartphones has revolutionized this field as with better camera quality; the converted documents are now much clearer compared to the older versions.
Some devices could scan and convert the offline documents earlier, but mobility was an issue as those devices were not portable. OCR software development has definitely solved the problem of mobility. Now, you can convert your phone into a scanner with the help of OCR app development.
Importance of OCR in Businesses
The global market of digital document imaging is expected to cross the $150 billion mark in the next few years. These numbers clearly state the need to develop an OCR app. The business processes are now becoming more complex, and the generation of data on a daily basis is massive. Delivering feasibility or ease of access to the users of any genre will undoubtedly add significant numbers to your overall revenue generation.
These apps eliminate the time-consuming processing of tasks and make your workforce more organized. We all can agree on the fact that it is much easier to access a digital file than a physical or offline document. As these mind-numbing tasks of filing physical documentation is eliminated, the operation cost also decreases and allows businesses to manage their utilities accordingly. Whether it is a customer or an employee, everyone loves the ease of access, exactly what these apps deliver. To increase productivity and customer service in your businesses, you should definitely consider to develop an OCR app.
Features To Be Included in an OCR Software Development
The success of any OCR app development is based on its embedded features. The quality and functionality of the features should deliver ease of access to the users. A bespoke OCR app development company will encourage you to use a set of efficient features in your app to gain popularity. There are various features with a specific task that are mandatory for the users and the back-end management of an OCR app.
Onboarding
Registration is a crucial part of the onboarding process of any app. To make this process simpler, you can insert a form asking for a few basic details like name, age, E-mail, etc. Any user doesn’t want to spend more than a couple of minutes on the onboarding page as they want to access the app’s functionality. You can add the option to use the social media handles to login into your app for ease of access. You can also add a reminder to ask the users whether they want to be logged in continuously or not.
Input Formats and Document Conversion
This feature allows the users to convert a scanned document into multiple layouts. Before the documents are scanned, your app should be able to recognize various formats of the documents such as PDFs, JPEG, .txt, Docx, etc. Apart from recognizing the formats, your app should allow various standard document formats that are widely used. Although some formats need extra effort, your app should restrict the scanning or conversion of these formats if you do not have the tech stacks to convert that particular format.
Real-time Document Detection
Detection of the document in real-time that too in sync with the user’s activity on your platform could be a good feature for your OCR app. This feature simply tells the users about the format or the type of document they are scanning in the app. Apart from that, if any document format is not allowed on the platform, it will notify the users that this format is not accepted; please try with other formats or document types. This will save the user’s time and efforts. Ultimately, this feature can bring you a pool of users and help in revenue generation.
Filters
There are times when the light conditions are not suitable while scanning the documents, affecting the quality of converted documents. Integrating various filters on your app will help the users in enhancing the quality of the scanned documents. These filters should be able to enhance some attributes of the scanned documents such as brightness, contrast, image saturation, crop, rotate, etc. You can refer to various apps for the types of filters available. After applying the filters, the users should be able to undo the applied effects in cased they didn’t like that particular filter.
Document Management
Once the user edits the documents, the next step is to save the converted document. This feature offers various choices of saving their converted files such as download in the phone, sharing on various apps, sharing on E-mail, compressing the file, and much more. While exporting the file, the users should be able to select the format in which they want their output files. There should be an option to download converted files in multiple formats.
Further, users should be allowed to download or re-edit the converted document over and over anytime. You can ask your OCR app development company to enhance the functioning of this feature for a better reach among customers.
Document Assist
Sometimes a specific document can be of multiple pages, and this feature helps the users scan and convert them. Users can choose to either apply the same or different filters on each page of the document. It would be better to include a file compressing feature in your OCR software development process. This will help the users to manage the file size of their documents.
A multiple-page document is often heavier than a single-page document, and with added filters, the file size increases. Some websites are available out there that accept a limited file size, and this feature will help the users overcome these challenges.
OCR Software Development Process
The process to develop an OCR app is a complicated task, as you are developing a technology, not a simple app. The app developer of the OCR app development company should be well-rehearsed in computer vision algorithms and machine learning. The crucial part of developing such apps is identifying each character and word according to the language and set of alphabets to which it belongs.
Besides the technical details, you have to understand the market’s needs and identify the customer’s expectations from such apps. You can either hire a marketing firm or conduct a market survey by yourself to identify these needs. Once you are done with the requirements, you can draw a roadmap to supervise the process. Specific points should be taken into consideration while developing this roadmap, such as budget, hire a company or freelancer, number of features to be embedded, number of platforms, etc.
Technologies to Consider
An OCR app development process consists of implementing various technologies, APIs, languages, and frameworks. There are various sets of APIs and languages available to develop different types of OCR scanners apps. Their prices can vary according to the various OCR software development processes.
APIs
Various application programming interfaces (APIs) are available in the market that can be implemented to develop an efficient OCR app. The function of each API is different; some help in image processing, some helps in identifying the images and texts, etc. Some popular APIs of this domain are Google vision API, Amazon Rekognition, OCR Space, and TensorFlow Object API. These APIs and SDKs are available for a varying amount of money.
Frameworks
A framework acts as the foundation of an app. These are required to include code, libraries, compiler, etc., that are used in the OCR app development. You can use two of the most popular open-source frameworks that are widely used to develop an OCR app. These frameworks are effective as long as you can train them as per your requirements. These open-source frameworks are Python pyocr and Tesseract-OCR.
Languages
As long as you are open to the idea of launching your app on multiple platforms, you can use various programming languages for your project. Popular programming languages for the development of an OCR app are Python that uses the pytesseract package, C++ that uses the Asprise C/C++ SDK, and Java. Each language has its own advantage, and you can implement it accordingly.
Cost and Team Requirements
The cost is a variable in an OCR app development process. Numerous factors can affect the numbers invested in your project. Now, you know about all the features and technological stack you should consider in your OCR software development. Please be aware that the number of features, APIs, frameworks, and the number of platforms can directly impact your app development budget.
It also depends upon the team you are hiring for the development of your project. Whether you are hiring a freelance app developer or other required personnel or a complete OCR app development company, the pricing of both these options will be different. An individual will bill you on an hourly basis, and an app development company will charge you based on their available engagement models. Although, most of the companies bill you based on hours and human resources invested in your project.
As per the team requirements, specific sets of people are mandatory for such an app’s development, such as project manager to supervise the whole process, QA for quality, UI/UX designers, and testing engineers for app testing.
Before hiring a team, ensure that they are familiar with the background of your app; check their reputation in the market and their reviews. A team with higher ratings and experience will charge you more, but they will definitely deliver you a sophisticated product.
Conclusion
An OCR scanner app is in high demand for the last few years, and room for improvement will always be there. A high amount of revenue generation and a big target audience are the significant highlights of this digital imaging industry. As long as you can offer some extraordinary and engaging features with higher efficiency, you can also make it big. Your innovative ideas can be implemented on the screen of your project with the help of an experienced app development company.
Matellio can help in making your idea a reality. Our team of qualified designers and app developers is well aware of every technology and development technique used in OCR software development. Our high client retention and success rate make us the reliable OCR app development company that you need. Call us to discuss your innovative idea, and we can get started right away!
