kargo

"To put that in context, this is in my opinion — and to the best of our lab’s knowledge — the best system at transcribing Mandarin voice queries in the world."

There is some data about this claim here: https://gigaom.com/2014/12/18/baidu-claims-deep-learning-bre...

Anyone here that has actually used their system and compared it to others?

The data looks impressive, but I am a bit skeptical of this claim, because I compared the Baidu OCR API for Chinese character recognition with the one from Microsoft recently. And I was disappointed. In many cases they were just as good as Microsoft's litte OCR dll that ships with Windows 10 [1]. Of course, OCR and speech recognition are somewhat different fields, but if anyone is an expert for Chinese language, then it should be Baidu.

[1] http://blog.a9t9.com/2015/09/baidu-ocr-api.html

Interesting... I see it now. I assume some issue during the PDF to image conversion in the web app. PDF support is just a few days old.

The OCR library itself supports only image formats as input and is "innocent" with regards to this issue ;)

Yes

Does it have to be open-source? If free, but not trainable and restricted to Windows apps/phone is good enough, then I recommend the Microsoft OCR library. It gives you very, VERY good results out of the box. An excellent piece of work from Microsoft Research. To test it, see for example https://ocr.a9t9.com/ which uses Microsoft OCR inside.

And for comparison, an OCR application with Tesseract inside: It has a dramatically lower text recognition rate: http://blog.a9t9.com/p/free-ocr-windows.html

(Disclaimer: both links are my little open-source side projects)

I know about Germany: Yes, they can. There are some limits in how many hours/year you are allowed to work. I think it is the equivalent of 2-3 months fulltime/year).

It worked well for me: 5 times our usual sales, at a 60% discount -- that is still twice the usual daily revenue. Plus the option to earn more when it comes to renewals.