Microsoft SkyDrive update adds Bing-powered OCR features

A new update was released by Microsoft for their cloud storage service which added Bing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) features to SkyDrive. The update was added in order to make it possible to extract the text from photos in your camera roll when viewing them on the SkyDrive site.


Microsoft goes into detail on a company blog and saying that; "We’re continually working to make SkyDrive the best way to always have your files with you, and one of the key areas we’re focused on is photos: relative to other file types, they take up the largest amount of space and people interact with them the most. We recently released a number of features that enhance the SkyDrive photo experience – from better visual design to easier searching and sharing across your devices. We’ve also continued to improve performance for the photos experience. Today, in partnership with the Bing team, we’re excited to release the first of several features that will make your SkyDrive photos smarter by using OCR (optical character recognition) to extract the text from photos in your camera roll when you view them on SkyDrive.com."



"Most of us can think of a time that we took a picture of something that we really just wanted the text from. It could have been a photo of a product label at a store, a picture of a magazine article or ad, or a snapshot of a sign with info you wanted to remember. When you take photos with your Windows Phone (with auto-upload turned on) today, we send them to your SkyDrive camera roll folder. With this new SkyDrive release, our OCR tool will automatically run on your camera roll photos so you can instantly see the extracted text whenever you view your photos on SkyDrive.com. For example, here’s a photo of an artwork label, with the text extracted and shown in the Properties pane."



Tech Crunch points that the Bing OCR control, it’s worth noting, is currently only available to developers who are working on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 store apps. It’s not available for developers who want to use it in their web apps, though Bing clearly made an exception for the SkyDrive team.