There are many iOS scanner apps, and I’ve previously blogged about my affinity for Scanner Pro. However, I’ve discovered a new app that’s a game changer – Scanbot Pro, and I believe that it is easily the best iOS scanner app available today.
What makes Scanbot Pro the best? It has OCR (optical character recognition) technology built in, so it can recognize and extract text from your scans. You can also annotate your scanned PDFs, including highlighting, notes, and signatures.
If you regularly work from your iPad or iPhone, this is a big deal. You are no longer dependent upon a desktop application to OCR text contained in a scanned document, and you can edit the PDFs within the same app.
I have been using it for several weeks, and I find it to be very accurate. Scanbot has a free version, but the OCR functionality is in its Pro version, which costs $4.99 (though it’s occasionally on sale). Trust me, this is money well spent, and I believe that you will find Scanbot Pro an invaluable tool for your iOS arsenal. You can learn more about this app here.
How do get the files from your phone to a meaningful location? Can you save them to Onedrive?
OneDrive is one of the cloud options, and you can set it to autoshare to your OneDrive as well.
You may want to check out Evernote’s new offering, Scannable. I’m a Scanbot user, but all my recent scans have used scannable. I’ve found that the actual clarity is much closer to using a full on scanner than scanbot ever was. Instead of trying to get it as close to what the camera sees, scannable seems to recognize that it’s paper and makes the whites whiter, the text crisper, etc. So it looks like what’s in front of me more than what the camera saw.
I used Scanbot for the first time today to scan a receipt and save it to Onedrive. For the purposes I needed, it was fine. I was able to do so with the free version for those too cheap to spend $4. Not bad.
I’ve been looking for a good OCR scanning app and came across scanbot. The reviews are stellar so I popped for the pro version. I tested this app on an iPhone 5s using a formal invitation I received in the mail. I scanned the invitation and used OCR capabilities to detect text. I then highlighted the pertinent information and created a calendar event. All this in less than a minute. This is exactly what I needed.