Comment by prng2021
6 hours ago
It was never “solved” unless you can point me to OCR software that is 100% accurate. You can take 5 seconds to google “ocr with llm” and find tons of articles explaining how LLMs can enhance OCR. Here’s an example:
https://trustdecision.com/resources/blog/revolutionizing-ocr...
point me to handwriting that is 100% legible...
If 100% is your standard, good luck solving anything ever.
By that standard, no problem has ever been solved by anyone. I prefer to believe that a great many everyday tech issues were in fact tackled and solved in the past by people who had never even heard of LLMs. So too many things were done in finance long before blockchains solved everything for us.
OCR is very bad.
As an example look at subtitle rips for DVD and Blu-ray. The discs store them as images of rendered computer text. A popular format for rippers is SRT, where it will be stored as utf-8 and rendered by the player. So when you rip subtitles, there's an OCR step.
These are computer rendered text in a small handful of fonts. And decent OCR still chokes on it often.
In my experience the chatbots have bumped transcription accuracy quite a bit. (Of course, it's possible I just don't have access to the best-in-class OCR software I should be comparing against).
(I always go over the transcript by hand, but I'd have to do that with OCR anyway).
From the article I linked:
“Our internal tests reveal a leap in accuracy from 98.97% to 99.56%, while customer test sets have shown an increase from 95.61% to 98.02%. In some cases where the document photos are unclear or poorly formatted, the accuracy could be improved by over 20% to 30%.”
OCR is not perfect. And therefore it is not "solved".
That definition, solved=perfect, is not what sandworm meant and it's an irrelevant definition to this conversation because it's an impossible standard.
Insisting we switch to that definition is just being unproductive and unhelpful. And it's pure semantics because you know what they meant.
3 replies →