Friday, August 06, 2010

Getting Evernote to OCR for you

Evernote is a great app that lets you make notes, take photos and screenshots, bookmark webpage and syncs everything so that you can access it from any computer, iphone or ipad. What I love about it, is that when you take a screen shot, it uploads the image to its server and tries to OCR the text, even hand-written text. Although technically speaking, Evernote doesn't actually do OCR:
"Evernote's image processing technology is a bit different. We analyze the image to generate a set of possibilities for each word that we see in an image. Each possible interpretation is given a score.
For example, we may look at a word and decide that this word may either be "clue" or "due", and we can assign a score to each possibility. This set of scored possibilities is stored in our database for searching.

As a result, there isn't a simple text representation that you can use. Instead, you can search our database to find the image based on the different sets of possible interpretations for each word."

Well, there is a way to get to that OCRed text (or data interpretation). You can find it in the files in Metadata/com.evernote.Evernote. Just in case anybody was wondering.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes I was wondering that. Any chance you could explain more about how to get that data? I'd find it really helpful.

Anonymous said...

Where? There are a lot of files... (And I searched through all of them with grep, but didn't find anything.)

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