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Best OCR software for a small business with a one time need? (lemmy.starlightkel.xyz)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello everyone.

I haven't had any need for OCR software in probably 15 years, but I have a client who has 7 document boxes worth of forms filled out by hand that they need digitized. They're scanning them into PDFs this week, but want to recover FirstName, LastName, Phone, Email and then a hand written feed back box and load those all into a database.

ChatGPT recommended ABBYY, but it looks like it might be overkill for a one time need like this.

I told them that a couple teenagers doing data entry might be more accurate and cheaper. IDK if that's really true though. I'm not at all an expert on OCR software.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

PaperlessNGX

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks for this suggestion, we're going to test it and see how it performs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Depending on the quality of the scan a quick python script using tesseract might be enough. Probs examples online

the handwriting will be full of errors but spell check and an editing pass should be fine? I imagine you'll have to do that anyway

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've not used it but maybe https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thanks for this suggestion. We're going to test it and see how it performs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

This for a standalone desktop PC

https://www.openpaper.work/en/

Paperless-NGX for a painless server setup

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

Mayan for enterprise server setup

https://www.mayan-edms.com/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Maybe try Marker, which uses AI stuff as part of their OCR process.

Stirling also support OCR using OCRmyPDF.

You can also use GPT4-V (e.g. via this library) to perform the OCR. It'll cost money though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

My company has gotten good results from Amazon Textract.