OCR!
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
Pampuk said:
Yes, as singlung says the OCR module isn't part of any bundle - between iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone 3G users the majority of our customers have devices that don't support OCR, so it would be silly to raise the price of the bundles for them to pay royalties for a feature they can't even use. And having a separate OCR-compatible-device-only bundle that gives you one of the regular bundles + OCR at a lower price than those would be purchased separately would create a lot of headaches - people who'd bought a non-OCR bundle on their iPod but now wanted to upgrade to OCR on the iPhone for the difference in price, e.g. - so I think it'll be best if we make everyone pay the same for OCR as a separate add-on.
As far as a bundle with every present and future non-dictionary add-on, that doesn't really make sense because it potentially handicaps our future licenses; if there's some incredibly awesome new feature (really good speaker-independent voice recognition, e.g., which I haven't seen for Chinese yet but which certainly might exist some day) that comes with a giant per-copy royalty, we wouldn't want to be prevented from licensing that by the fact that we'd then have to pay those royalties for thousands and thousands of people who'd bought that all-add-ons-included bundle.
singlung said:
It should be available in the finished version, but it'll probably remain an "Experimental" feature that has to be enabled in Settings before you can even see it - it works pretty well (better than any other solution I've seen for that on iPhone anyway), but still if a photo is too askew / out of focus / inconsistently-lit / etc the output can be absolute garbage, so I'm wary of putting it out front too much when the results can be so unsatisfying for people who don't take the time to learn how to use it properly.
character said:
Brand-name yes, but if you add up the cost of an autofocus cell phone camera part to the cost of a Bluetooth chipset and the cost of a battery it seems like there ought to be an economical little device doing that somewhere - might be a good excuse to for me to take a tax-deductible trip to Las Vegas for CES, anyway
(or go to the HK Electronics Fair for that matter) Designing even a fairly simple device from scratch is probably beyond our means, but a Pleco-branded version of a reference Bluetooth camera design is much more feasible.Entropy said:
The $1500 figure I never quite get, since that presupposes that the person wasn't going to have some sort of cell phone anyway - the $600 maybe makes a little more sense, but I'd be inclined to think of an iPhone 4 purchase more in terms of the $100-$200 premium over a simpler "feature phone" or a super-low-end Android phone.
kevin mogg
Member
Wanted to make sure I am on the right page getting a device that will run the OCR acceptably.
Would get the iphone four, except I already have a carrier ( Verizon) and can't switch to ATT. Non-subsidized new price out of my budget. Limited offerings of used iPhone 4s at this time.
New Ipod Touch 4th gen is a definite no with no autofocus. No workaround coming any time soon, right?
So Only choice is iPhone 3 GS. Is that completely acceptable? Any performance difference compared to iPhone 4?
Is 8 GB 3GS ok? Seems a far bot cheaper than the 16 or 32 gb models on the used market. Think I can get a Craigslist 3GS in the 2 - 300 dollar range used.
All dictionaries together take up about 1 gig?
And OCR out in about a month or two.. right?
Any other device suggestions?
Kevin
San Francisco
(Bummed the new iPod Toucn won't work)
Would get the iphone four, except I already have a carrier ( Verizon) and can't switch to ATT. Non-subsidized new price out of my budget. Limited offerings of used iPhone 4s at this time.
New Ipod Touch 4th gen is a definite no with no autofocus. No workaround coming any time soon, right?
So Only choice is iPhone 3 GS. Is that completely acceptable? Any performance difference compared to iPhone 4?
Is 8 GB 3GS ok? Seems a far bot cheaper than the 16 or 32 gb models on the used market. Think I can get a Craigslist 3GS in the 2 - 300 dollar range used.
All dictionaries together take up about 1 gig?
And OCR out in about a month or two.. right?
Any other device suggestions?
Kevin
San Francisco
(Bummed the new iPod Toucn won't work)
kevin mogg said:
The iPod 4th-gen might work with a macro lens case (a few of those already exist for the 3G) but we'll have to get an iPod and some cases here before we can validate that - our add-on system won't even allow you to purchase the OCR add-on on a non-autofocus device, though, at least not initially.
kevin mogg said:
Performance seems to be about the same - should feel about as "live" as the demo video does. And the 8 GB model should be fine - total figure for all dictionaries + extended audio files is still a bit under 1 GB actually.
kevin mogg said:
Hopefully, yes.
RobRedbeard
进士
First, the iPhone 4 is ridiculously good hardware, getting it is easily justified. However, once you add Pleco to the equation, well, you just should already have the i4 in your pocket by now.
Mike, great stuff with this OCR. I'm happy that I switched to iPhone now. If you need on the ground beta testing I'd be happy to focus on sign reading etc and give feedback.
Anyway, back to Xcode!
Rob
Mike, great stuff with this OCR. I'm happy that I switched to iPhone now. If you need on the ground beta testing I'd be happy to focus on sign reading etc and give feedback.
Anyway, back to Xcode!
Rob
RobRedbeard said:
We're pretty full up with testers now, but since you're a regular feedbacker / forum poster we might be able to make an exception in your case - is your iPhone jailbroken by any chance? (given your Android background I'd have to think it is)
Entropy said:
At the moment the beta won't even let you open OCR on anything other than an iPhone with an autofocus camera, but we're leaning towards changing that in Beta 2 (and the finished release) so that people who want to ignore our recommendations and try using it with a non-autofocus 3G/iPod Touch (maybe with a macro lens case) or use the "experimental" still image recognizer on a non-camera-equipped iPod/iPad can give it a try, so if your device is jailbroken we might be able to include you too at that point.
RobRedbeard
进士
mikelove said:
Yes.
John said:
I'm surprised to receive an e-mail from Vodafone UK just now saying that my order yesterday is dispatching for arrival tomorrow! And I thought it would take them several weeks...
So it seems I'll have the hardware very soon and the software ... around the end of this month maybe ?!?
(I'll be in Taipei next weekend on holiday and it would be nice to (unexpectedly!) try it out whilst there but of course it's no problem at all if the software won't be available yet.)
John said:
Could be. Though per your Taipei comment, I should note again here, as I already have in a few other places, that this system is mainly designed around simplified characters. It supports the few thousand most common traditional characters, but it doesn't support less common ones, nor is it likely to do so in the near future; we don't have the recognition templates for those, and even if we did they'd diminish accuracy to an unacceptable degree due to all of the extra false positives.
Assuming the traditional characters supported include the 1,945 joyo kanji:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
which all Japanese school children are expected to learn, can the OCR be configured to display the on'yomi and kun'yomi Japanese readings of any character recognised (both of which are already in the Pleco dictionaries I believe) ?
If this can be so configured, then I think I can use the Pleco OCR to tell me the Japanese readings (e.g. a particular character is "kita") which I can then input into an electronic Japanese dictionary (designed for native Japanese speakers who - unlike me - can recognise the kanji). Otherwise, I have to use my Japanese electronic dictionary's handwriting input function (if it has one and assuming I write it correctly) or one of the various systems for looking up an unknown Kanji character (e.g. by radical; Jack Halpern's SKIP system; etc).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
which all Japanese school children are expected to learn, can the OCR be configured to display the on'yomi and kun'yomi Japanese readings of any character recognised (both of which are already in the Pleco dictionaries I believe) ?
If this can be so configured, then I think I can use the Pleco OCR to tell me the Japanese readings (e.g. a particular character is "kita") which I can then input into an electronic Japanese dictionary (designed for native Japanese speakers who - unlike me - can recognise the kanji). Otherwise, I have to use my Japanese electronic dictionary's handwriting input function (if it has one and assuming I write it correctly) or one of the various systems for looking up an unknown Kanji character (e.g. by radical; Jack Halpern's SKIP system; etc).
John said:
It doesn't include all of them - there are a few hundred Kanji that don't even exist in Chinese - and the system would likely be somewhat bothered by the presence of lots of kana it couldn't recognize, so unfortunately this won't work very well for Japanese. (licensing a Japanese-friendly OCR system would be very expensive, and even if we did we'd probably get beaten to the punch by another company that actually specializes in Japanese dictionaries)
panamajack
举人
Great news Mike! Pleco's feature set simply sells itself; us fans barely need to evangelize. Will the OCR feature necessitate a) a new version of Pleco and if yes b) iOS 4.1? Or will it just be an add-on for 2.1.2?
Dr.Grace said:
Thanks!
panamajack said:
There'll be a new version of Pleco, yes, 2.2. OS-wise, 4.0 should be fine too but 3.x won't work since they don't have the necessary video capture APIs - since it only runs on the 3GS/4 there wouldn't really be much reason to want an earlier OS anyway.
dustpuppy said:
Thanks!