Show HN: Textra – extract text from images, PDFs, and audio (Mac CLI tool)

by freedmand • 4 years ago

1 1 4 years ago

freedmand• 4 years ago

Hi HN!

A few months ago, I was playing with Apple's live text tool which allows the user to select text from images. I noticed the quality of the text extraction was unreasonably good, and it worked offline. As someone who has studied free, on-device OCR libraries extensively, I had not seen anything with such high quality that works locally.

I built out Textra over a few weeks as a response, which is a command-line tool for Mac OS 13+ (needed to access the latest high quality APIs) that gives the user easy access to Apple's on-device text extraction APIs. The tool is in early stages but has hit a point where it feels like it's approaching a good mix of stability and utility.

The text extraction (OCR) quality is among the best and fastest I've seen for on-device recognition (approaches the quality of cloud services like AWS/Google). The speech extraction is not as high quality as recent alternatives like OpenAI's Whisper, but it is very fast, efficient, and probably good enough for many use cases (and doesn't require a large download).

It is my hope that this open source tool can help journalists and the public with text extraction needs.

Show HN: Textra – extract text from images, PDFs, and audio (Mac CLI tool)

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