I wouldn't say never. It seems to me that it wouldn't be particularly difficult to develop an app optimized for OCR on the text on a computer screen. You may have to have some way to mount the tablet computer but the text on a screen is very uniform. Someone said the fact that it's made up of fairly large dots makes it harder but it occurs to me that with good enough resolution on your camera, not the monitor, you could very easily recognize text. It's a little like distinguishing dots in a braille cell. There are a lot more dots in the matrix that makes up a single letter on a screen in text mode but it wouldn't take a particularly sophisticated algorithm to recognize those patterns. About 10 years ago, I wrote an perl script that captured an image from my VCR, ran an OCR program on it, and spoke the text. So I could actually hear the set-up screen on my VCR. It was so cumbersom that all I could do was set the time and that took me about an hour. But today, you can buy video capture USB cables for about $15. The OCR software, tesseract is free. All it would take is for someone to put that together. Boy, I wish I had money. This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do with IAVIT (www.iavit.org) if only we had some money. Anybody got a couple hundered K they're not using? On 09/30/13 05:22, Ben Mustill-Rose wrote:
Hi,
It depends on what you want really; most people should be good enough at it to get little snippets of the content which can still be helpful - E.G. if you hear "installing Windows" theres no prises for guessing what it might be doing. I saw a device once called a top braille which was able to convert a printed character into braille in more or less realtime, the idea being that you would be able to move it accross things like newspapers and read them more or less as quickly as you would do a braille book. Unfortunately at the time it didn't work on screens, but if it could be made to work this would doubtless be the solution we've been looking for.
I do agree that a combination of eyes and automation are a much better solution though and some things - E.G. setting up RAID are never going to be possible with OCR for most people.
Cheers, Ben.
On 9/29/13, Kerry Hoath <kerry@ciscovision.org> wrote:
This is highly unreliable but can work. Some people use Prismo or Text detective but you need an Iphone 4s or better, good lighting, a nice screen and a pile of luck.
I find it easier to borrow a pair of eyes for the 2-3 minutes it takes to solve most stuff I need. I did hear of one person instaling windows 7 with this solution, however levtek's winstaller and Brian Smart's talking PXE projects are probably better for this although Brian's project needs some helpers in 64-bit land.
Regards, Kerry.
On 29/09/2013 1:05 PM, Jackie McBride wrote:
Yeah--good luck w/that.
On 9/28/13, David Mehler<dave.mehler@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I'm looking for a phone based solution, preferably free or low cost, that'll do OCR on a computer screen? My issue would be to use it to obtain information on boot up errors, selecting items in a boot list, for example newer boards the f12 options?
Thanks. Dave.
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