What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?
TL;DR: OCR is technology that converts images of text into machine-readable text data. When you scan a paper document, the result is an image — OCR analyzes that image and identifies each character, making the text searchable, selectable, and editable.
Modern OCR uses AI and deep learning to achieve 99%+ accuracy on printed text. It can handle multiple languages, different fonts, and even handwriting. OCR is essential for digitizing paper documents, processing forms, and making scanned PDFs searchable.