Simon WillisonMar 30, 2024

I built a new tool: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr - it runs OCR against images and PDFs entirely in your browser (no file upload needed) using Tesseract.js and PDF.js

I wrote more about the tool and how I built it (with copious amounts of Claude 3 Opus and a little bit of ChatGPT) here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/

OCR PDFs and images directly in your browser

Show threadJageMar 30, 2024
@simon I love reading about your process. It's been so fun to create small applets using AI with a bit of human assist. Do you think the Tesseract OCR has improved over the past few years? I remember it being quite sloppy back in the day.
Show threadSimon Willison
@Jage it definitely has - they moved to a fancy LSTM neural network based thing within the last 5 years I think
Mar 30, 2024 at 8:29pmWeb
Show threadJageMar 30, 2024
@simon Very cool. Thanks for sharing.