[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.