Evernote’s OCR

Ray Crowley reminded me about how amazing Evernote’s OCR capabilities are.

OCR in @evernote is outstanding. I searched for "equity" in my notes today and it correctly returned the following: pic.twitter.com/fMGXXwCYHT

— Ray Crowley (@ray_crowley) August 19, 2015

It works so well because for each scanned word, it records all the possible different words it thinks it could be. This would obviously be completely impossible with traditional OCR.

If you want to take a look at the OCR in one of your notes it’s very simple.

1. Copy the note link. It’s fairly easy to find e.g in the windows client, right click the note in the list view. It will look something like: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s317/nl/41374917/d3e3b6b4-7716-473d-8978-e0000008e7ea
2. You then need to put the last bit of the address (d3e3…..) after https://www.evernote.com/debug/  to get https://www.evernote.com/debug/d3e3b6b4-7716-473d-8978-e0000008e7ea
3. Put the address in your browser and scroll through all the metadata for the note including a picture at the bottom

The possible “false positives” are a small price to pay for such an awesome system.