OCR tools convert physical documents, like receipts and invoices, to machine-readable text. Advantages of this technology include improved enterprise search and customer service.

As organizations process and digitize thousands of paper documents every year, optical character recognition plays a central role in many digital strategies.

Before organizations had OCR tools, they often scanned paper documents and stored them as images. This approach benefited organizations, as it enabled corporate-wide document access, archival access and reduced physical storage requirements. Yet, it didn't let users extract or edit data within those documents. OCR, on the other hand, can convert image text into editable formats, add searchable layers to PDF files and extract external metadata.

Explore the advantages of OCR and discover how to implement the right digitization tools across an organization.