The technology of OCR – abbreviation of Optical Character Recognition allows users to convert images into editable text. For your information, in the end of September 2009 Google has developed a new feature on one of its product. Yup, now you can use Google Docs to perform OCR to extract text from digital images.
Let’s say that you have bunch of scanned images (from paper documents), you received those images from your boss and he wants you to write all characters from those images into Microsoft word document. If it is the problem, there is no need for you to find OCR software. You can use online based free OCR using the Google Docs. Actually it’s not yet integrated with Google Docs UI but the OCR service has been available in googlecodesamples.
How To Use Free OCR With Google Docs
1. Go to OCR form
2. Login to your Google Docs account
3. Browse your image !
According to googlesystem, you can upload images in .jpg, .gif and .png formats, and the maximum size of 1 image file uploaded should less than 10MB.
4. Click “Start OCR import”
Your OCR result will be available on your Google Docs interface, the result may not always perfect (depend on many factors like resolution, noises and so on), you can either save or edit the text.
In my quest finding OCR service or software, there are not many of them are free. In the upcoming posts I will try to share more free OCR software for you as alternatives. Have you tried the free OCR with Google Docs to extract text from image? Feel free to share your experience in comment section 
