Apparent’s Doxie Go document scanner software is now fully OCR capable. I was skeptical of the results, but It’s Apparent once again surprised me.
To enjoy the OCR functionality, you’ll need the Doxie Go. The first generation Doxie is not compatible with the OCR capability. The OCR feature is not active by default; you need to hook up your Doxie Go first, visit the Preferences, and activate the OCR feature.
Once you’ve done that, a number of options become available. One of them is to set the languages — yes, pulral — you would like the Doxie Go to recognize. You can select as many as you want, but when you’ve selected three of them, a warning pops up, saying you will see a decrease in processing speed with each new language you check. Seems logical.
Two other options complete the OCR Preferences tab: maximum resolution, and whether you want text only, or image with text above or underneath. Then you’re all set.
Usually, OCR sucks. When I read It’s Apparent was going to use ABBYY OCR software, I wasn’t expecting any better than when Apparent would have gone with Omnipage. Well, I was wrong. ABBYY seems to have been a fine choice. I seelcted three languages: English, Dutch, and French. I fed Doxie Go with three mixed-language documents and all three were correctly recognized.
Now this could be due to the structure of those documents — they were forms and therefore quite limited with regards to the content, except for some instructions, that is. Nevertheless, the same forms were incorrectly recognized by Omnipage software. So, my conclusion: the Doxie Go just got more powerful and more useful.
Oh, and very important: for the device, Apparent had already dumped the pink hearts when it came out. Now they have done the same for the software!
[...] you go, then pushes scans directly from the scanner to Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or Evernote. We reviewed the regular Doxie Go with OCR recently and before that, the Doxie Go when OCR wasn’t added [...]