I want to talk to you about OCR

tony1
Participant V

Hello app creators. We’re working on a new optical character recognition (OCR) feature, and I would love to hear from you all about how you would use this feature in your apps. You can reply to this thread or shoot me an email at tony@appsheet.com.

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84 REPLIES 84

LeventK
Participant V

This is awesome @tony

The use case for this that one of my clients has is to be able to OCR a Store Receipt for materials purchased and enter them against a Budget set up for categories. It would be awesome if we can combine AI and OCR to do this. If there were budget categories, say Lighting and Plumbing and the receipt had Bulbs and Faucet, for example, that they would be categorized and recorded properly.

Same here

Jonathon
Participant V

Tony, my use case:
Transcribing materials tickets into the app (similar to receipts). A shipper brings a load of material, such as sand, we must record the quantity of sand brought and maybe other details such as the truck ID. This is recorded on physical tickets that the truck drivers keep for their records / payment, and we get a copy as well.

One issue is these tickets can come in a large variety of formats, meaning it would be difficult to have reliable OCR.

How I would use it with AppSheet:

Ideally, I would scan a ticket and be able to use SPLIT() on some character or character(s) to break the ticket apart. Users could then identify, for that particular ticket format, where the relevant information lies in terms of an index number on the SPLIT() list. These index numbers would be remembered / carried forward and should stay consistent for a particular ticket format.

In this manner, users should be able to set up a convenient workflow for OCR scanning of a wide variety of tickets…

Max1
Participant I

I would love this as we read water meters and this would be helpful to log the numbers automatically.

tony1
Participant V

@Max and @Jonathon, could you email me a couple of example images? tony@appsheet.com

Hi TONY, I just got few questions.

OCR feature would work during offline?

When the user take photo for the digital indicator fixed on some equipment, then OCT could read numbers and transform to text ?

Tsuji

Ami
Participant V

I would love to use it in 3 ways

  1. LPR - license plate reader to scan cars lisence plates
  2. ID scanner to search for certain fields in an ID card.
  3. Data scraping from a web app in order to collect data from a service i dont have an api for

Francios
Participant III

This is awesome. Can’t wait

Thumbs up!

I would use it for a number of manufacturing use cases

  • Receiving items
  • Receipts for expense reports
  • Stock takes
  • Packaging mock-ups

MultiTech
Participant V

Oooooo, I like this.

I have clients in the medical sector, they would love to be able to import data from reports produced by diagnostic/testing equipment.

@tony One user case would be… emplyees are measuring roof, walls etc. level by level (in a building) with laser before they can start the manufacturing process with inside walls. With the OCR they could read the measure directly from the laser’s display without manual typo error.

Yilmaz_Kandis
Participant III

Really Great.
I think it could be used to match and confirm purchasing records and the scanned suppliers invoice to make sure quantity and price is same or % within tolerance.

AP invoicing…

My first need for it would be to read through pdfs to quickly find the information related. For e.g. currently, I save quotes and invoices in pdfs to send to customers and scan a copy of the signed hard copy in pdfs as well. When a customer called in to discuss something about a certain quote or invoices, I use the pdf editor to search through the pile and show me the page.

In fact, I was about to ask the question how can I hook up a service to read the OCRed pdfs with Appsheet.

Wingo

Our use case would be:

  • use barcode feature to scan a UPC
  • use OCR feature to scan the readout on a scale to record with the scanned UPC

We take analysis of flue gas. With OCR we don’t have to type the parameters into our App but simply scan the Screen.
Example Image:

Great work Appsheet, TYVM!
CRM apps need to OCR Contact data from business cards
Balance sheet apps need to OCR and auto categorize receipts

Dan_Lawrie
Participant III

This would be perfect for POD’s and collection/delivery status updates for me.

I would use it in the field to capture appliance and mechanical equipment model numbers and serial numbers and BTU inputs.

Wow cool feature, I would use it for my ebs register app. I receive 3-10 pages of claims containing product name,qty,expiry,reference, etc.

Curtis_Pazdar
Participant III

There are so many uses… reading handwritten timesheets, invoices, tool serial numbers… When can we expect to see this feature rolled out?

Jerry_Lan
Participant V

Kudos Tony!

  1. OCR by itself will be a really cool feature!
  2. The 2nd picture with the field identification is a bonus cool feature!
  3. If It could recognize handwriting and change into text, that will be one more overkill bonus! But 1 and 2 is already good enough!

Use Case:
In my previous company, they fill all those delivery orders by hand. If you could just take a picture of the delivery orders and have them converted into text and put in the right field in appsheet, tracking delivery will even seem fun I bet!

license plate reader to scan cars license plates

Love it!! Agree with all of the above. Store Receipts would be our biggest need and then packing slips. Agree with all of the above as well. Outstanding!!

This would be excellent. In my work, we often have to record data from labels (like business cards) to input into a database. I was actually hoping this feature would be implemented as it would allow me to work on building an app in the near future. Thanks!

Chris_Jeal
Participant V

@tony, This is an awesome feature.

I would probably most definetely use this for a type of ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) for my Yard Management System.

Nice one Tony!! When do you anticipate releasing this feature? We will use it for fleet management.

tony1
Participant V

Hey everyone. Here’s a demo of the feature, please take a look! We’re hoping to get this out to beta testers within a week or so.

Cool can’t wait to test. Thumbs up to appsheet team

@tony baller!
Will it recognize and pull the code from a data matrix code on the image?

So… you are imagining seamless text recognition plus barcode scanning all in one? Hmm… very interesting. Don’t know if anybody doing that.

@tony - great new feature, and thanks for showing it in video. Best way to see the value!

WOW! If you need beta testers I’m super keen.

Looks great, I have been waiting for this feature for a while, can you sign up to become a BETA tester?

Much appreciated.

Great new feature!
Please let me know when I had a chance to test it.

Awesome…can’t wait to test

rmul
Participant I

This looks so cool! looking forward to trying this out