Remotasks 101: What Is OCR?

If you’re planning to join Remotasks or if you’re a new Remotasker, you might have heard of people doing something called “OCR tasks.” However, some people might have no idea what exactly OCR means, and why it involves a lot of pictures of documents, menus, and text content. What exactly is OCR?

Remember, our projects in Remotasks also involves the transcription of various text-based content. This is actually our way of helping make more accurate OCR software. How does this work, though?
‍

What is OCR?

OCR means Optical Character Recognition. This technology allows systems to recognize text inside various images, such as photos and scanned content such as images. Ideally, great OCR should be able to convert any kind of image into readable text - regardless if the text is printed, handwritten, or typed.

What is OCR used for?

At its core, OCR can have a lot of creative uses, depending on the kind of needs users want to accomplish. These can mainly take on the following:

• Repurposing and processing documents, especially old newspapers and books that users want to archive and store.
• Scanning paper documents, where users can scan documents they possess for dissemination to colleagues for editing.
• Extraction of quotes from magazines and books for course studies and other purposes without having to retype everything.

What’s this got to do with Remotasks?

Interestingly, our contributions to OCR tasks allow us to help companies and teams further improve OCR-based technology.

When we transcribe text from documents and other images, we’re helping the systems inside OCR software to properly sort and identify various texts they’re seeing from images of their users.

I want to try OCR tasks!

If you’re interested in trying our OCR tasks, you can join us in Remotasks for free! You just need to sign up in the Remotasks website!