[RandomBookmarks]

In the "better than Tesseract" category is also Microsoft Azure OCR (not as good as Google) and the OCR.space OCR API (also not as good as Google, but 100* times cheaper/free, and supports PDF).

The best - and most expensive - solution is still Abbyy OCR. They provide an SDK than can be used locally.

A new local OCR solution is Anyline.io, but I have not used them yet.

[anonynamja]

Sorry to hijack this but I have a question about your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14441748

How did you get Copyfish to play nice with Zhongwen/Perapera? I've tried it with Chrome and Firefox and nothing seems to get them to pick up on the OCR text.

[beagle3]

I'm trying to read things like street signs, speed limits, store names, from not-necessarily-axis-aligned pictures - so far it seems only Google OCR can do those (and does them quite well). Is Abbyy worth trying for that use?

[maxerickson]

No API, but mapillary is doing that with machine learning:

http://blog.mapillary.com/product/2017/02/06/towards-global-...

It seems likely that Google is doing something similar.

[ocrcustomserver]

I can probably help you with that, send me an email.