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OwlOCR 1.0
p/owlocr-1-0Snappy, secure, on-device OCR for MacOS
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Tommi Urtti

OwlOCR 4.0 - Near instant text recognition for Mac!

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This handy little utility lets you use text recognition to instantly capture anything on the Mac screen. Digitizes your scans and files to create searchable PDFs. Everything is done on your Mac to ensure full privacy and performance.
Most features are free!

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Tommi Urtti
Maker
Hi Product Hunters, 👋 It's my great pleasure to come back after 8 months to show you the reimagined OwlOCR for the Mac! 💡I've always wanted to build things and even become an entrepreneur and during the first pandemic lockdown I built the initial version of OwlOCR that launched earlier this year. The core problem I wanted to solve is: "there’s text on the screen you want to copy, but it cannot be copied." This happens more often than one might realize (think videos, zoom slides, scanned documents or any app where the text is not selectable). ✏️ This app lets you simply select an area on your screen and any text in that area is machine read and copied to your clipboard. 🔒 All of this happens pretty much instantaneously, on-device, so it’s fast enough even for short text snippets and completely private for any business purpose! Further than that this app offers the possibility to work directly with PDF and image files to run batch text recognition on them and export them to searchable PDF versions. ⭐️ Since the start of the year OwlOCR has gathered the love of almost 2,000 monthly active users who have rated it on average at 4.7 out of 5 stars. Can't wait to hear your feedback and I'll be here to reply to any comments!
Fernando Cordeiro
@frankbyte When are we Windows users getting some ❤ ? :)
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@frankbyte @mrcordeiro Everything about this is so native to MacOS that there is pretty much exactly zero transferrable code here for Windows.. The concept however should work in Windows just as well! The important part is that the tech stack needs to be fast enough for near instantaneous results. I think it's a great idea to work on something like this for Windows!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@frankbyte @mrcordeiro @johan_eliasson Facts  (Seriously though I hope we get something this on Windows as well, I do use that occasionally as well and miss it there!)
Fernando Cordeiro
@frankbyte @johan_eliasson I can't afford one (or rather, one that's better than my current Levono) 😭
John Fahmy
@frankbyte @fernando_cordeiro2 I use this for Windows 10 daily via Parallels Mac virtualization as well as with macOS Panel Editor.
Nicolas Nemni
Cool! :) Could you explain this sentence that I found on your website: "The text recognition algorithm that is used has been developed by Apple and is a part of your MacOS operating system and is only run on your device." @frankbyte
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@frankbyte @nicolasegosum Thanks! Seems like the sentence structure is a bit backwards on that one. There's two things there: 1) the text recognition happens on your device (Mac), meaning that none of your screenshots or files are sent to online to any third party service. 2) the text recognition engine that is used has been developer by Apple and is included as part of the MacOS operating system. This is basically the reason why Big Sur has more language support compared to Catalina.
Nicolas Nemni
@frankbyte @nicolasegosum Ok thanks, makes more sense like this. I thought your program give a UI to a feature already existing on MacOS. :)
Leo Selie
Absolutely love it! I had a couple of OCR tools, but this one beats it. Def appreciate the non-subscription module, which was an instant buy for me (even though I prob don't need the pro features). Common everyone, buy this!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@leo_at_zapier Thank you, thank you Lionel! The Pro IAP is also for supporting development so much appreciated!
Yevhenii Peteliev
Wow! Looks very useful. Great job! I can't wait when I try it 🖤 Congratulations!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@peteliev Thank you! I def hope you find it useful, I've personally come to rely on it! Be in touch if you miss any features that would fit in nicely!
Szymon Adamiak
Wow that's fast. Good luck!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@sadamiak Thanks Szymon!
Merlin Laffitte
Great idea, going to try it! Congrats on the new launch
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@merlin_laffitte Thanks Merlin! It's an incredible day :)
Reorx Xiao
Which service/API do you use for OCR under the hood? Just asking for privacy concern :)
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@novoreorx No problem at all. OCR is performed using Apple's computer vision algorithms, the Vision framework.
Mobileinfo
Good job!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@gulakoleksandr Thank you!
William M. Ballance
Super useful. This has been a big pain point many times.
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@mballance Thanks William! Glad to hear you'll find it helpful, thanks for commenting!
Gabriela Trueba
Love this! getting it-congrats!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@gabriela_trueba1 Thank you Gabriela and thanks for commenting! I really really appreciate it after putting in some long nights and late hours! ❤️
Tommi Urtti
Maker
Oh wow, thanks for the love everyone, just signed in after taking some time off from online and found all this going on here, this is great!
Xiang Ji
Great product. Exactly what I wish I had when reading texts contained in images e.g. comic/manga. I see that it has already added support for multiple new languages (including Chinese) in Big Sur. I wonder if it would be possible to support more languages in the future such as Japanese, Korean, Russian (I would imagine there are good OCR engines out there for those languages as well).
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@hackerxiang Thanks Xiang! Yes, I bet you're right. By substituting the OCR engine language support could be expanded further. It might be a bit tricky though, primarily since you'd first need to understand what language is in there and then use the best engine for that language. It's possible, but might get trickier than initially thinking. Good idea though!
Michael The Geek 
Congrats! it look very nice. I use it.
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@michaelthegeek thanks Michael! Great to hear from an 🍎 enthusiast!
Haran Rajkumar
I find OwlOCR 4.0 to be super helpful. I use it in two scenarios, to save text from videos/live meetings and to copy text from websites that don't allow you to select text.
Andre Lima
Capture text from screen / image / PDF. Integration with Finder. Use from dock / menubar. Shortcut keys. CLI version. Free version available.
Daniel
Hi there. Congrats on creating such a great tool. I only have the question if it would be possible to make it more RAM efficient? After automatically starting it only requires a low amount of RAM (~15-30MB) however as soon as I've done one screenshot it requires more. That itself shouldn't be the problem except that it hovers at that level from then on. (~150MB) Maybe you can build a timer inside the program that puts it back to the state in which it first started in, after a certain amount of time since the screenshot was taken. Best regards and thanks again for this amazing tool!
Tommi Urtti
Maker
@itsdaniel Thank you! I'll put that in the backlog. I've been adding quite a few features over the last 6 months so it should be a good time to do a performance related update. Wiping the screenshot with a timer might be unexpected to some users, if they'd rely on it being there... could be an option I suppose.