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I would pay money to buy a image to text software (text recognition) if it was as good as Microsoft's and I could run it batch on my images.

Good news: You don't need to pay, because Microsoft OCR is available for free, nicely packaged as "DLL". The caveat: It currently supports only UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/08/optical-ch...

For a quick test, try https://ocr.space - a free ocr api that uses Microsoft OCR on the backend.

Pay Google for Google Vision API access. I'm using it for OCR and quite satisfied with the recognition quality