

A phone that photographs printed material and then reads it back. - robg
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/10/26/the_possibilities_of_a_portable_eye/?page=full

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SingAlong
A lot of us may have passed thru such ideas, but this is a simple idea
executed well.

The last time I had such an idea, I was wondering how Google used machines to
scan library books for their Google Book Search project. I heard that those
machines were HP ones. Machines that scan books page by page and converts
those into text(ofcourse since it has to be searchable). Always wondered how
the text in images was reconised.

If such technologies that can recognise text are already here, then its not
going to be very soon when captchas will be rendered totally useless.

~~~
chris11
I don't really know how wide spread its use is, but there is already software
that can solve captchas. Researchers have been able to get above 30%
recognition rate for captchas since january.
[http://internetcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-
mo...](http://internetcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-
mobile/articles/18772-yahoos-captcha-brokenis-spam-tsunami-the-offing.htm)

