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What is OCR?
OCR is technology that reads text in pictures or scans and turns it into text you can edit and search.
- Category Media & creative
- Also called optical character recognition
- Updated 20 Oct 2026
OCR, explained simply
OCR stands for optical character recognition. It looks at an image of words and gives you the words as text.
You may have used it to scan a receipt, copy text from a photo, or search a scanned PDF.
This matters because paper and images become searchable and easy to copy. AI has made OCR better at messy writing.
It still makes mistakes with blurry photos or odd fonts. Check important numbers.
On ITG Now, free tool guides cover OCR tools that turn scanned pages into text, with install steps.
Related terms
Computer visionSpeech-to-textMarkdownLocal AIAI model
Questions people ask about OCR
Is OCR free?
Yes, many free and open source OCR tools exist. Phones also include it for free.
How accurate is OCR?
Very good on clean print, weaker on handwriting, blur or low light.
OCR vs computer vision: what is the difference?
OCR reads text in images. Computer vision is the wider field of AI that understands images.