is this better than the terrassect OCR?
Tessarect can be used everywhere, and is used dominantly on open platforms. This is a offering from Microsoft to be used on their platform only.
They may both be good, but they have widely different platform targets.
so far, this microsoft OCR is just bunch of words without any prove that it actually works, what so ever. show me some pictures or videos of results.
But from my experience, what adds to the slowness is pre-processing the image to make it suitable for OCR, especially tesseract. I still haven't found the magic combination of filters because every image is different, especially if your source them from users camera phones.