Envision app is now the best Text Recognition app out there.
Envision has met all of their (and your) development milestones for 2020, which is cause for celebration! You know Envision as a good text recognition app, but all powers this year went into optimizing the app, with features that no other app out there offers. And of course, that causes for a celebration, read on!
Developments
Envision started 2020 with adding dynamic type support and the jump to page feature in document scanning. They then went on to many much-requested features like adding support for more file types like Word and ePub and topped it up with the library feature. Where you can add any piece of text to read at a later time.
The year was rounding off with two more unique features - column detection and translate, which translates entire documents to over 60 languages.
All features listed below:
Instant Text:
Uses the video feed of the camera to constantly speak out the text in front of it. Ideal for quickly reading short pieces of text envelopes, room numbers, street signs and cereal boxes.
Document Text:
Captures an image of a document and uses our optimisation algorithms to give you accurate output of the text in it. Ideal for dense and complex documents, letters, invoices and menu cards.
Read Multiple Pages:
If you have text that spans multiple pages, you can scan all of them at once and read them together. Ideal for school assignments, magazines or books.
Handwriting Recognition:
One of the unique advantage of our text recognition is that it is well-trained in also recognising handwritten text. Ideal for handwritten notes, greeting cards and letters. Not ideal for doctor's prescriptions.
Available in 60 Languages:
Our increased localisation efforts ensures that our text recognition can recognise over 60 different languages, including languages with different scripts like Japanese, Arabic and Hindi. Find list of all the languages we recognise here.
Translate Text:
In addition to recognising text in different scripts, you can also translate the recognised text into any of the 60 language that you want.
Automatic Language Detection:
If you are a multilingual user or deal with text in several languages at once, the automatic language detection if your friend. It detects the languages of a piece of text and makes sure it is spoken out with the correct voice.
Document Edge Detection:
This feature provide audio cue about whether all the edges of a document that you are trying to read are in the frame or not. It offers audio guidance that enables users to position the camera correctly over the document to ensure all of it is captured.
Column Detection:
This feature is key as it can help you read magazines, newspapers or other columned text in the correct manner, without jumbling up the text.
Read from Images:
If you come across images, on messaging or social media apps, you can share those images with Envision to get a description of what's in the image as well as recognise what text is on it.
Import Files:
In addition to images, it is also possible to import files that you get in PDF, Word and ePUB format. Envision makes their content accessible and easy to read.
Save to Envision Library:
When you want to save a piece of text to read it repeatedly or at a later time, you can save it directly into the Envision Library.
Export Files:
The text recognised by Envision can also be exported as a .txt file, copied to your clipboard or shared directly into an app of your choice.
Magnifier:
For users with low-vision, the Envision app also works as a magnifier to enlarge and read a text you wish to read. You can also adjust contrast with Invert Colors.
It's time to celebrate!
For everyone who has not had a chance to try Envision again after all new implementations, we give everyone 14 days Envision for free, also those who have already tried Envision before. After our free trial, you get 35% off our annual subscription. Please (re)try everything and get yourself the discount from now until the 31st of December.
Comments
Hard to recommend
Sorry, but I currently find the instant text recognition of Envision a painful experience - it's rarely comes close to being “instant” and its accuracy leaves a lot to be desired.
Seeing AI is hands down better for recognizing small amounts of text - for example on food packets or address labels.
For scanning letters, it's Voice Dream Scanner that wins hands down. Its extremely fast and very accurate.
Of course, your own mileage may vary, but for me the annual subscription to Envision was a waste of my money. The only consolation has been that at least it was half price.
Here's hoping that you make me reconsider this opinion in 2021!
2021 is the year
Hi Squirrel,
Thanks for your reply. The team worked hard to update the app and really hope you experience the value this time around!
I love everything about this app and reply to Squirrel
This app has quickly become my go-to standard when needing to OCR something. I use it at work for reading documents clients bring in. I use it for scanning recipes, labels and other documents during daily life. I use the quick text for reading labels, signs and other printed text. One thing I absolutely love this app for is reading screens. I'm a gamer, and because not all in-game dialogue and lore is voiced, I use the Quick Text feature all the time to read in-game dialogue text boxes, and it is perfect for that. And the document scanning works well for reading bigger blocks of in-game text which is super helpful. And Squirrel, as long as Offline text recognition is enabled, quick text should be almost instantanious. It's so fast at times that I can't always keep up. Anyone who hasn't tried this app needs to. I know it's a bit lame to have a subscription service, but I honestly bought the lifetime membership a couple years ago when it was half price and don't regret it for a second. The only other OCR app I use from time to time is Voice Dream Scanner, and that primarily because it allows you to retain the image instead of just dumping the text. Envision does at times drip text in weird orders, but I'm thinking column recognition will potentially resolve this. You all owe it to yourself to at least try this one. I'd love to try the envision glasses in fact, though I'm not rich enough for that step.
issues with the app
I used to use EnvisionAI reliably to read directions from my freshly meals. I did this with the document reader. Ever since this month or maybe last, it seems document reader has become less reliable. I have to agree with the poster above me that I now use Seeing AI over EnvisionAI due to this unreliability, which is a shame. I hope there can be a return to how things were.
HMendi
What sort of trouble are you having with it? I personally haven't noticed a downgrade in performance myself, and I do use it quite often. I'm running it on an up-to-date Iphone XR, as well as an up-to-date Ipad Pro 2020 at work. Both work great. I have offline text enabled and am dealing primarily in English. With Offline text recognition there is some slowness, but with offline it should be pretty fast. Try experimenting. I find Seeing AI was the slower and less accurate of the two recently, though I admit I haven't used it in a few months.
Agree with first commenter in this thread.
I paid for the life-time subscription to Envision, and am thankful and happy to have it in my visual assistants toolbox, but the issue I've had for several years now is that when I use the feature to just read text, it seems to read in languages other than English, even though I've checked multiple times to make sure that English is the only option enabled. So, because of that weird quirk, I cannot rely on it. As others have said, Seeing AI ends up meeting my needs about 95 percent of the time. I'm sure I'd love Envision a lot if the above mentioned issue could somehow get resolved. I seem to recall reporting it 2 or 3 years ago, so maybe it's just something unique to my phone for some reason.