OCR like evernote WITH text search for attacments

[Matthew_Billiod]

Please add an OCR engine for images and files along WITH ability to search text of attachments.

1. Normal search engine should be able to find text in files such as *.xls, *.doc, *.txt

2. evernote like OCR engine should be similar to evernote’s.

3. evernote like OCR engine should be able to search through image and PDF attachments

4. User should be able to UPLOAD/CREATE files that can be OCR’d by one (or both) of these methods:

• the ability to upload multiple images to one record and have every image in that record OCR’ed. Said upload should be able to be done from both a camera and a file picker.
• the ability to upload multiple images into a single file (ie create a pdf or something similar). Said upload should be able to be done from both the camera and from a file picker. Said pdf-like-file should be able to be searched with the evernote like OCR engine.

Use cases:

• Airtable would make an AMAZING receipt scanner app IF it had an OCR engine like evernote.
• Also, it would make a great document storage app that would beat google drives capabilities if it would be able to OCR pdf files with an engine like evernotes.
• would also fill void of why some people use Adobe Acrobat on android- to store / create docs that they can reference later for legal purposes.

Use cases from other users on airtable:

Text and table formatting

one might keep a database of excerpts from academic papers, and link relevant things in their project to those excerpts. Or say someone OCR’d a bunch of documents (contracts, receipts, whatever). They can upload the picture version, sure, but it’s not searchable,

Barcode/QR support in Mobile app(s)

In addition to barcode and QR, would you ever consider OCR?

I’d love to use Airtable to take stock of the 500 cars I have in my dealership, and if the camera scanner had OCR built in as well as barcodes and QR, I’d be able to zap in the license plates.

One More Note About the OCR Engine

The reason I keep mentioning evernotes OCR engine is because it doesn’t make singular judgments about how to covert an image into text…instead it takes the user’s search string and finds any portion of an images that could match the search criteria (within a certain % of confidence). This is perfect for receipts and pictures taken with a camera where the image capture environment is not very well controlled.

[David_Krizan]

I second this, I would absolutely love to switch my receipt scanning to Airtable, as I’m sure would many personal and business users. Perfect addition to Blocks. Has anyone successfully used the Vision block to process receipts?

Also, a block for pulling in product info from Amazon or other sources (see the Home Inventory app for Mac as a great example). This would be a killer feature, especially combined with the Vision block.

[Mouser-IB-Admin]

I can't believe that nearly 7 years later there still isn't OCR for any uploaded files. This is such a huge drawback to putting PDFs into Airtable right now because they can't easily be searched.