Beta 3.2.99

We just pushed another Android beta out that's mostly focused on one specific thing: making our 'experimental' still OCR algorithm a lot faster, in anticipation of it hopefully replacing the previous new one as the default soon. (to be honest, we made a mistake of fixating too much on finding a new algorithm that would be fast enough for live OCR when in retrospect the #1 priority should have been getting the best accuracy possible for screen OCR + still images, but we're pretty sure this new one will offer that)

it seems like the best OCRs for chinese are the ones that seem to be using paid LLMs. with the current business model of pleco, I'm afraid in the future it might be a bit difficult to compete in this sphere with subscription based apps like migaku.

Clicking on the "Chinese History: A New Manual 7/e" in the Add-ons makes the app crash.

sparkly12345 said:

it seems like the best OCRs for chinese are the ones that seem to be using paid LLMs. with the current business model of pleco, I'm afraid in the future it might be a bit difficult to compete in this sphere with subscription based apps like migaku.

Click to expand...

We're using an LLM based OCR, just one with light enough memory requirements to run on mobile. If we needed something server-based we could charge a subscription for it, but given the advances happening in local inference (the latest Google Pixel seems to have more CPU die space dedicated to AI than to actual CPU'ing) I don't necessarily think that we will.

(in general my attitude towards GenAI has been that I'd rather roll it out slowly and end up with something that can run on-device and cost me nothing than roll it out too fast and then be stuck forever on an expensive subscription model dependent on somebody else continuing to subsidize my server bill with VC money)

stacktic said:

Clicking on the "Chinese History: A New Manual 7/e" in the Add-ons makes the app crash.

Click to expand...

Thanks - this was actually not specific to 3.2.99 but should be fixed now.