Optical character recognition software can help push your paper problems away.

Whatever you do, don't let your staff of professional typists, data entry clerks, and information specialists know you're learning about optical character recognition (OCR) software. If they knew, they might be concerned by the fact that a scanner and some nifty software can do their jobs in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost.

The value of a scanner to a business increases greatly when combined with OCR software. When a document is scanned into a computer, the text in the document is readable, but not editable. This is because the scanner captures the document as an image. OCR software expands on the scanning process by reading individual characters and entering those characters into an editing program such as Word. Documents scanned using OCR software can be updated, edited, or filed for later use.

OCR is an example of an idea that has had to wait a little bit longer than the mainstream acceptance of the personal computer before becoming a useful business tool. Many early versions of different OCR software programs were plagued with errors that would negate the time saved by scanning. Natalie Miller, product manager for Caere's OmniPage Pro OCR software, believes that such programs have since caught up to, and exceeded, their human counterparts. "Today there is no doubt that if you put a human typist next to an OCR engine," she says, "the OCR engine will pull out the end result much faster and more accurately."

Using a clerk who can type seventy words per minute, it would take more than an hour to transfer a 5,000 word contract to a computer, assuming the clerk typed error-free. With an accuracy rate of ninety-nine percent, a scanner and OCR software would require just minutes to transfer the same information. Wallace Schwab, president of Maurepas Services Ltd., a Quebec City-based translation company, views his OCR software as the key to a quick turnaround. "It's a productivity accelerator," he says.

Schwab uses OCR in conjunction with other translation programs, and notes that the increased attention to detail in deciphering written text means his software, OmniPage Pro 9.0, can handle unusual French and Spanish letters. "They've tried to make it as user friendly as possible," he says, "where different accents, diacritical marks, aren't as cumbersome to deal with."

Similarly, the latest versions of OCR software have been able to jump another early hurdle - tables, charts, and other non-text marks on scanned documents. When Schwab received the latest upgrade to OmniPage, he tested its ability to reproduce charts by scanning the economic tables in The London Economist. "I really wanted to make the system squeak," he says. It managed to recognize the small tables and eight-point font with only one error. "It screwed up on one thing," recalls Schwab, "but when you're getting a less than one percent screwup it becomes a joke."

One area that still trips up most OCR programs is paper and printing quality. A document with many wrinkles, a coffee stain, and correction marks is probably going to be more prone to OCR error than a clean sheet fresh off of the printer. Says Miller, "if you mangle the page the recognition is not going to be as accurate."

Fred F. Ross, author of OCR with a Smile, a guide to OCR scanning, points out that some programs handle quality issues differently. "One document may be a dot matrix document," says Ross, "and there is definitely one software that will do better [with that type of document] than the other."

A simple solution for addressing varied results is to run more than one OCR program against a scanned document. Quickly comparing the errors among the three programs is an easy way to see which software handles different types of scanning best. "For a small business owner to go and buy two or three pieces of software is a very prudent decision," says Ross. "In the long run they will save multiples on labor in form of editing."

He points out that for big OCR projects, a few errors per page can add up. "If you have a 50-page document and scan it on three programs, you can cut down the error rate from 15 to seven errors per page and save 400 errors on the document that would take you two or three hours to fix on the other end," he says.

With accuracy rates still reaching for perfection, manufacturers are moving towards more experimental methods of reproducing the written word. A new type of software, known as Voting OCR, enables the computer to decide the 'best' choice among different OCR programs, and then automatically place confidence in that program for the chosen area.

Says Ross, "it will extract from the three pieces of software what it believes to be the best situation, and that will cut your errors rate as much as eighty percent against using one single piece of software." While Voting OCR eliminates most errors it is much more expensive than typical programs and not recommended for a small business unless it specializes in data entry.

Miller sees OCR development heading into aspects of artificial intelligence as technology improves. "We're trying to get the software to look at the document as a whole and make decisions based on the overall feel of the piece," she says. Ross says the next step is to make "software that would analyze the entire sentence, and in the context of the sentence, find the missing word."

Surprisingly, business computers, and not programming technologies, are currently holding back entry into the next level. "I don't think the computers that we have today are powerful enough to do this kind of recognition at the sentence or paragraph level," says Ross.

While OCR software isn't yet perfect, it is a proven time saver for businesses in the process of converting paper-based documents into digital resources. If your business would be improved by saving a room full of paper on a floppy disk, OCR merits your investigation. Take care, though, when it comes time to pick your program.

The OCR food chain runs the gamut, from entry level to top notch. If you plan on scanning the occasional memo, the stripped down OCR program that comes bundled with your scanner will probably make do. In the same vein, if after reading this article you're ready to dismiss your loyal staff of typists, you owe them the courtesy of learning which OCR program will do the best job of replacing them.