6 best Android OCR apps for extracting text from photos

Do you want to digitize any printed document to keep a soft copy of it? If so, all you need is an optical character recognition (OCR) tool. There are several online OCR tools, but it is not convenient to digitize documents by phone. Here are 6 best OCR apps for Android.

1. Google Keep

Great note-taking application from Google has a number of tricks and creative applications. It also supports the built-in OCR tool. Google Keep extracts text in various formats from simple to complex. It also keeps formatting the original text to the maximum extent possible.

1. Complete how to download and use Google Keep

Instructions for extracting documents:

Step 1: Add a new note and click the + icon.

Step 2 : Select Take photo to scan documents from the camera or select Choose image to import an image from the library.

Step 3: Open the image, click on the three dots menu and select Grab image text .

Text will be extracted in seconds. Perhaps the best thing is that the text will be synchronized on all your devices automatically, so you can scan documents on your Android phone and edit it on your computer.

Download: Google Keep (Free)

2. Text Scanner [OCR]

Text Scanner [OCR] supports more than 50 languages ​​including Chinese, Japanese, French and many other languages. It even supports extracting text from manuscripts. The application interface has basic scanning features such as magnification and brightness slider to capture the clearest text possible.

Instructions for extracting documents:

Click the blue shutter button to capture and scan documents. In addition, you can also import images by clicking on the library icon.

The extracted text will be displayed. From here, you can edit the text, copy or share it with third-party applications.

Download: Text Scanner [OCR] (Free with ads)

3. Text Fairy

Text Fairy is another photo extraction tool for Android that can recognize text from more than 50 languages ​​including Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, French and many more. It supports many Indian languages ​​like Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, etc. You will be asked to download the required languages ​​on the application when you first run it. It works well with paper documents but has trouble recognizing text with multiple colors.

Instructions for extracting documents:

Step 1: Click on the camera icon to take a picture. Also, click the library icon to import an image from the library.

Step 2: Select the part of the image you want to scan. Click on the forward arrow to continue.

Step 3: Select the layout of the document as a column or two columns.

Step 4: Select the language of the text.

Step 5: Finally, click Start .

And the text has been extracted, you can now edit or copy it to wherever you want.

Download: Text Fairy (Free)

4. Office Lens

Office Lens is a Microsoft protable scan application for Android devices. Its salient feature is scanning and digitizing documents, but it also comes with a handy OCR option. It has a paid version, but you can use it for free by registering a Microsoft account. With this free account registration, you will also get access to other features such as 5GB of free OneDrive memory and the ability to save multiple formats.

The application can recognize text with colorful fonts. In addition, it can identify text from handwritten notes, tightly integrated with other Microsoft products like OneNote and Office 365.

Instructions for extracting documents:

Step 1: Open Office Lens and direct the camera to the document you want to scan. It will automatically detect the text of the image, but you can also adjust it yourself. Press the capture button.

Step 2: Touch Save .

Step 3: In the 'Save to' section , check the Word document and touch the tick icon.

When open, you can make any necessary edits.

Download: Office Lens (Free)

5. OCR Text Scanner

OCR Text Scanner has a simple interface and supports over 55 languages ​​including English, French, Italian, Swedish and many other languages. The application cannot retrieve text from the manuscript. The application has many ads so you'll have to wait about five seconds between each scan.

Instructions for extracting documents:

Step 1: Touch the camera icon to scan the document. To import a document from the library, click the three dots button, then select Import .

Step 2: Select the language of the document and click Grab Image Text.

It will display the extracted text. You can easily copy or share text from here.

Download: OCR Text Scanner (Free with ads)

6. CamScanner

CamScanner is one of the favorite text extraction applications from photos. However, when extracting text, it is often lost or misspelled. Another great thing about this application is that it can handle a wide range of documents. Unlike some other applications, it does not require many manual settings before scanning documents.

The free version of CamScanner allows you to view text in read-only mode, so you will have to upgrade to the advanced version to edit the extracted text.

Instructions for extracting documents:

Step 1: Touch the camera icon to scan documents with the device's camera. To import photos from the library, click on the overflow menu and select Import from Gallery.

Step 2: Open the image and tap Recognize .

Step 3: You can click Recognize full page to extract text from the entire image, or click Select an area to extract text from a specific section.

Download: CamScanner ( Free , Free version )

Remember that no OCR tool is 100% reliable when extracting text. You should edit and check documents before saving them. Please choose for yourself the appropriate text extraction tool.