Let’s talk about OCR (Optical Character Recognition). You have images, and you want to extract the text from them.

There is an application with a nice user interface design that allows you to upload an image and extract text from it using the OCR function. This is Filestack.

In a 7-minute tutorial on the Filestack channel, the YouTuber Wesley from the ByteGrad channel (113K subscribers) teaches us how to implement this function.

IIn his example, the influencer uses a café menu image from Unsplash to demonstrate how Filestack’s OCR works.

“We’re building an app where users can upload photos of menus. I’ll click ‘upload,’ and after a short wait, we get the results: Espresso: 3, Piccolo: 3.5, Cappuccino: 4. It looks accurate! This shows how easy it is to add image-to-text functionality to our apps,” explains ByteGrad in the tutorial.

Watch now:Image to Text Made Easy with Filestack

Check thecodeused in the video

Multiple uses

Text extraction from images has many practical applications. For instance, you could create bookkeeping software that automatically processes receipts and invoices by simply taking a photo.

In his video, ByteGrad demonstrates the code behind this process. He details how to use Filestack’s API key for Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

“Filestack provides a straightforward way to implement OCR. Using the uploaded file’s ID, we can easily retrieve the extracted text in JSON format,” explains ByteGrad.

Another use case is verifying signatures on documents. Since OCR services usually incur costs, ByteGrad discusses adding security measures to prevent unauthorized API calls.

He notes that Filestack’s custom dictionaries offer a way to enhance OCR accuracy, allowing for more sophisticated applications.

Another feature is text sentiment analysis, which looks like a typical AI feature. “You can do other things like copyright detection and document detection right. Basically, you’re building some kind of document management app with lots of features.”