Blogs

Out at dinner last week with my family, we enjoyed a trio sampler with buffalo wings, mozzarella sticks and potato skins. Delicious, right? It was, and it inspired me to prepare my own trio sampler, except one of a different type.

My trio consists of recent examples that I think are making the general public more apt to incorporating capture technologies into daily activities. This mobile application, gadget and use case trio sampler shows interesting and innovative scenarios to which we can apply OCR and capture technologies. I wanted to highlight these examples because they show that there is an increasing awareness of how OCR and capture technologies can enhance everyday life.

Mobile Application

First in my OCR trio is an app. In December Toyota introduced their mobile shopping tool application that leverages OCR to allow customers to shop for their Toyota vehicle, anytime, anywhere. When a customer is shopping for a new car, the app allows them to take a picture of the vehicles VIN to search, compare, and store features. With the app being available on iPhone, Android and Blackberry markets, it really brings mobile consumers that much closer to applying capture technologies to an ordinary task, such as shopping.

Gadget

Also in my sampler is a cool gadget that I came across recently. At CES, ION released a solution for Kindle, Nook and other eBook users and fans. The ION Book Saver is a conversion system for printed materials. It uses OCR to allowconsumers to easily convert books, newspapers, magazines or other printed materials to digital files that are compatible with popular electronic readers. As I said a few weeks ago, when items can make headlines at CES amongst a flurry of other big technology announcements, it shows mass interest and progress for data capture.

Use Case

My trio wouldn’t be complete without a cool use case, and for that I turn to my AIIM Capture Community peer, Chris Riley, who discussed using OCR to digitize and edit wine labels. This was a great use of OCR technology, and goes to show that there are a lot of things that OCR can be used for beyond traditional scanning of paper documents and converting them to text. Chris even mentioned that he uses OCR to make life more efficient in other key areas, such as email, Flash and screen captures, programming code snippets, and YouTube videos. 

This trio – my three instances of a mobile app, a gadget and a use case -- are prime examples of how OCR has moved outside the workplace. The everyday consumer becomes more comfortable with the technology when we show them how it can simplify their life. Do you know of any interesting ways that OCR and data capture are showing up in everyday activities?