LetterSnap OCR

Pictures to text, fast and exact.

4 followers

Pictures to text, fast and exact.

4 followers

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Launch tags:iOS•Productivity•Photography

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It just so happens that every good app is designed for Apple phones only. What did Android users ever do to you people? 😟

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10yr ago

LetterSnap OCR

Maker

With LetterSnap, take pictures of text and extract the actual text. The app is powered by Google Cloud Vision, which lets it tackle weird fonts, Chinese + Japanese, colored backgrounds, text at an angle, most anything you can throw at it. Also wrote the simplest, fastest workflow I could conceptualise -- one or two taps to get the text, that's it!

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10yr ago

@pixelglow Any chance of a web version with screenshot upload?

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10yr ago

LetterSnap OCR

Maker

@flowsion good idea but not at the moment. It's a faster workflow on device native because as soon as you tap the button, it sends the image and receives the text.

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10yr ago

@pixelglow i just played a little with Google Cloud Vision. thats alarmingly impressive. awesome idea to put this in an app. i bet it didnt even take you a lot of time right? little effort, big results. awesome.

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10yr ago

LetterSnap OCR

Maker

@gopietz from start to finish, about 6 months part-time. Google Cloud Vision and camera integration were pretty straightforward. What took the most time was getting the user workflow fast and smooth e.g. working on user interface overlays, how to show history without getting in the way of taking more snaps. I actually had a totally different navigation worked out based on the pages of a book with limited history. My designer @thecolourfool quite rightly pushed me in the direction of unlimited history in the form of a list.

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10yr ago

@pixelglow @thecolourfool sounds well thought through. i obviously didnt mean to undermine your work. i bet it was still a lot of work without googles API. keep it up and good luck!

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10yr ago

Only 10 free snaps, and paid "packs" puts this in F2P games territory for me. I wanted to try this, but this business model made me not even install it. Paying for quantities of fancy OCR's, paying per file, etc. will never be a part of my toolkit. I pay for general use cloud stuff, yes. Adobe, dropbox, simplenote a while back. etc. But charging per "use" just sours it.

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10yr ago

LetterSnap OCR

Maker

@fruityth1ng I do understand your concerns and I generally feel the same way toward F2P games and scammy IAP's. However, the underlying service, Google Cloud Vision, effectively charges per use. So if you pay a flat fee for unlimited snaps, I would still end up paying for any snaps beyond that fee. Indeed there is a moral hazard encouraging extra snaps to take advantage of this price gap. Running a monthly subscription is a little better, if I could make the accounting work out. But I don't like subsidizing frequent users with infrequent users' subscriptions i.e. the gym membership model -- I don't think it's fair to infrequent users, especially in hoping they don't notice the recurring fees, and I figured it would be a big ask for a reasonable subscription fee. (Somewhat colored by my own experience with Adobe CC vs CS...) So that really leaves pay per use. I could charge a flat fee + minimal per use charges (or similar combinations) but I felt that was somewhat complicated and it would be hard to show utility without some form of free snaps. I'm happy to talk about alternative funding models, maybe there's something I missed.

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10yr ago

@pixelglow Hmm. I'm at a loss now why I felt the need to say that in such a negative way. You make compelling arguments, I don't know what other model would work better or what would have ired me less. For me personally, it might have been the "snaps" naming. Though they sound catchy, I can't think of any reasonable emotion why I'd agitate this much. I think it boils down to that I can't blame you for me not being the target audience for a reasonably priced & very original service :) Seeing your pricing tiers, I think you already provide a fair volume discount curve :)

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10yr ago

@pixelglow @fruityth1ng You could use https://ocr.space/OCRAPI as OCR API for a free tier. Its not as good as Cloud vision, but pretty good and has a very generous free tier

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10yr ago

Awesome, does this work with handwriting ?

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10yr ago

LetterSnap OCR

Maker

@shtooova if your handwriting is neat and non-cursive, it does a pretty good job. Download and try one of the 10 free snaps on your handwriting to see if it works.

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10yr ago