
Show HN: Pixibot – Slack bot that makes text in posted images searchable - rgbasin
http://www.pixibot.co
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Roritharr
Thats neat, just installed it to test. We sadly don't post much stuff that
needs ocr'ing, although the occasional screenshot here and there is useful to
ocr. Sadly I don't see that we would ever get over the 100 uploads a month
limit.

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cooper12
In an ideal world this wouldn't even be necessary. This just speaks to the sad
state of image format adoption and workflows. Every browser supports basic
SVG. SVG text can be read by screen readers, indexed by search engines, found
in the page, copied, resized, machine-translated, and everything else you
expect from _text_. Why are we still taking raster images of text? I think the
onus should be on the OS and browsers to implement snipping tools that can
save in SVG. Regardless I still think this is a cool project for making that
lost information accessible.

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ue_
As much as I would like to have this, in addition to your point about browser
support, there are reasons I can think of from the top of my head:

There isn't widespread support in image editing programs to simply add text to
a jpg/png/whatever, then save the result as an SVG.

Most people don't see any motivation, as most people don't have a lot of text
on images.

A lot of images with text are screenshots or photographs, rather than with
overlayed text.

Upload services for images usually don't support SVG.

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cooper12
Yeah unfortunately I have to agree that the workflow just isn't there yet.
(definitely a chicken-egg aspect to it) I can kinda see why, editing SVGs is
completely different from editing raster images. (the former is pretty much
code) The only reason I can see why image hosts don't support uploading it is
because SVG has had some security issues. (don't know if this is still a
factor) As for your point about most images not being text, I agree, but SVG
does support embedding raster images so it would only be a small cost that
yields all the benefits mentioned.

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amelius
May I ask, what OCR engine does it use?

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rgbasin
It makes use of an ocr.space API

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Rando1
Thanks. That is the one at
[https://ocr.space/ocrapi](https://ocr.space/ocrapi) ,or?

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edsouza
is there more information? mobile version of website shows a giant logo, and
if you scroll down it shows a static image of a slack channel [1]

Using Android/Chrome

[1] [http://imgur.com/n5f6bAG](http://imgur.com/n5f6bAG)

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rgbasin
Thanks for pointing that out... this link will help with the missing gif!

[http://www.pixibot.co/static/img/pixi_intro.mp4](http://www.pixibot.co/static/img/pixi_intro.mp4)

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danielskogly
Hey! I just fixed this yesterday for Wishy.gift
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159528)).

You need `muted` for videos to autoplay in Chrome/Native browser on Android,
elsewise it just won't play. Try it out :)

edit: Oh, btw. Pixibot looks slick! Very cool application of OCR.

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rgbasin
Hey thank you!

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deckar01
It might be a better UX to post a snippet since those get folded to a short
preview.

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faisalhassanx
Hey Ron. You're on Product Hunt.
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pixibot](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pixibot)

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rgbasin
Thanks Faisal! Mind adding me as a Maker? Just sent in a request

