
Ask HN: I made a cool OCR based desktop app. Possible to commercialize? - bhavin
Dear HN,<p>I recently worked in my spare time to develop something for the fun of it – A desktop software that can monitor the current activity on a given machine for all the web browsers, including incognito modes.<p>Basically, the software continuously runs silently in the background, uses screencap, image processing and OCR to resolve what is being accessed, hence it can work on all browsers (and potentially on anything else). The CPU usage is quite negligible due to series of optimizations. It currently works for Linux, I am working on a windows version.<p>I am not sure if there is a commercial potential to it, and if so, how do I go about realizing it? Can you think of anything in your field where something like this could be useful?<p>Any help would be much much appreciated. Thank you! :)
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jetti
If it only handles web browsers currently then I think it will be a hard sell.
The use I see of this would be in settings that companies don't trust their
employees (call center monitoring comes to mind). That being said, they would
most likely be tracking HTTP traffic already so they would be able to tell
what sites the employees were visiting. If you could parse out other
applications I could see it being a hit.

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bhavin
Thanks! I can parse any applications really since it reads the data from the
display buffer. Web browsers was just an example, it is application agnostic
at the core.

> If you could parse out other applications I could see it being a hit.

Could you elaborate?

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jetti
The market I see it for is monitoring workers and by using this you would be
able to get an idea of what people are working on/doing

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uptown
Something like Prey comes to mind:

[https://www.preyproject.com/](https://www.preyproject.com/)

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davelnewton
That seems a little different.

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toexitthedonut
Could be useful for a headless computer system, to relay the information to
someone working on it via terminal.

