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If you use Google Drive as a main source for storing all of your files, documents, spreadsheets etc, things just a got a little bit easier for those of you who primarily have another language as your first language. Today Google has announced some improvements to the optical character recognition technology within Google Drive to support all of the world’s major languages which totals over 200 in all spanned across 25 different writing styles. This is a pretty big advancement for something that so many people use ever day, especially for anyone that tends to scan in documents or other files on a consistent basis where the optical character recognition is needed.
Google states that it’s pretty easy for anyone to access the technology and is only comprised of a couple of steps that are simple to reach. For users that are interested in taking advantage of the OCR, all they need to do is simply scan a document and then upload it to Google Drive in whatever format it ends up in after the scan, so this could be PDF or otherwise. From there users simply have to right click the image of the scanned document and select “open with Google Docs.” At this point, the document opens up in Docs with a copy of the scanned image as well as the text within the image that has been extracted into the Doc file.
In addition to doing this through the use of Google Drive on the desktop, the OCR technology with new language support is available in the Android app as well so you can utilize it on the go if you have to. Google also notes that upon uploading a scanned document to drive, thanks to the new supported languages the OCR will be able to determine automatically which language the document is in with no need from the user to specify which language it is, making the whole action almost seamless. For now this works best with high-resolution documents in common typefaces, but Google states they are working towards making the experience better for those who have scanned in lower quality documents with some of the more uncommon typefaces as well.
