OCR Fax: Increasing the Value of Internet Fax
One of the most useful features of electronic faxing these days is OCR Fax or Optical Character Recognition. With OCR Fax, you can manipulate or edit text from a fax.
Most electronic faxes are sent as .tif images; a file format that can’t be edited. But OCR converts faxed documents to computer text that can be manipulated using any common word processor or spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Word, Excel or XML – making it easier than ever for companies to manage documents and process forms.
- Fax OCR: Converts Fax to Text and Text to Fax
Though OCR technology is now coming of age, Optical Character Recognition is not new. The United States Postal Service began using OCR machines to sort mail back in 1965. Commercial OCR programs hit the market a decade later and were widely available beginning in the 1980’s. Initially, accuracy rates were often less than 50 percent but today, OCR has become a much more sophisticated, viable business tool with accuracy rates of up to 99.5 percent. Google uses OCR to index the text inside scanned PDF documents.
While Optical Character Recognition converts typed or printed characters into editable text, ICR, or Intelligent Character Recognition, is more advanced; it translates handwriting into editable text. The accuracy rates for ICR are not yet as high as OCR, but the technology continues to improve. When used together, ICR and OCR enable businesses to gather large amounts of data securely, with increasing accuracy and with minimal human intervention.
Here’s how some of our customers at ISC International are using OCR/ICR:
- One customer faxes documents containing confidential information related to government security clearance. Because ICR and OCR capture that sensitive data automatically, the risks associated with human review are eliminated.
- In the health care industry, one customer uses combined Fax OCR and ICR to confidentially conduct government-mandated physician surveys.
- One equipment manufacturer uses Fax OCR and ICR to tabulate hand-written meter readings taken from office equipment in the field and faxed to a central location.
These are just a few examples of how companies are benefiting from the use of ICR and OCR in concert with electronic faxing. But nearly every industry can take advantage of these technologies to revolutionize data work flow.
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