Editing Optical character recognition (section)

===Visually impaired users===
In 1974, [[Ray Kurzweil]] started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and continued development of omni-[[typeface|font]] OCR, which could recognize text printed in virtually any font. (Kurzweil is often credited with inventing omni-font OCR, but it was in use by companies, including CompuScan, in the late 1960s and 1970s.<ref name=Scantz82/><ref>{{cite journal |journal=Data Processing Magazine |title=The History of OCR |volume=12 |year=1970 |page=46}}</ref>) Kurzweil used the technology to create a reading machine for blind people to have a computer read text to them out loud. The device included a [[Charge-coupled device|CCD]]-type [[Image scanner|flatbed scanner]] and a text-to-speech synthesizer. On January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a widely reported news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the [[National Federation of the Blind]].{{Citation needed|date=October 2011}} In 1978, Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. [[LexisNexis]] was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload legal paper and news documents onto its nascent online databases. Two years later, Kurzweil sold his company to [[Xerox]], which eventually spun it off as [[Scansoft]], which merged with [[Nuance Communications]].

In the 2000s, OCR was made available online as a service (WebOCR), in a [[cloud computing]] environment, and in mobile applications like real-time translation of foreign-language signs on a [[smartphone]]. With the advent of smartphones and [[smartglasses]], OCR can be used in internet connected mobile device applications that extract text captured using the device's camera. These devices that do not have built-in OCR functionality will typically use an OCR [[API]] to extract the text from the image file captured by the device.<ref>{{cite web|date=27 June 2015|title=Extracting text from images using OCR on Android|url=https://community.havenondemand.com/t5/Blog/Extracting-text-from-images-using-OCR-on-Android/ba-p/1883|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160315001012/https://community.havenondemand.com/t5/Blog/Extracting-text-from-images-using-OCR-on-Android/ba-p/1883|archive-date=March 15, 2016}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|date=23 October 2014|title=[Tutorial] OCR on Google Glass|url=https://community.havenondemand.com/t5/Blog/Tutorial-OCR-on-Google-Glass/ba-p/1164|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305231423/https://community.havenondemand.com/t5/Blog/Tutorial-OCR-on-Google-Glass/ba-p/1164|archive-date=March 5, 2016}}</ref> The OCR API returns the extracted text, along with information about the location of the detected text in the original image back to the device app for further processing (such as text-to-speech) or display.

[[Comparison of optical character recognition software|Various commercial and open source OCR systems]] are available for most common [[writing system]]s, including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Bengali (Bangla), Devanagari, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.