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Google Drive’s OCR feature now lets you edit scanned docs in 200+ languages

 

Google has long had Optical Character Recognition features in Google Drive, allowing scanned paper document uploaded to Drive to be indexed and edited. Now, Google just recently expanded the feature to more than 200 languages and 25 writing styles.

To make this possible, engineering teams across Google pursued an approach to OCR focused on broad language coverage, with a goal of designing an architecture that could potentially work with all existing languages and writing systems. We do this in part by using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to make sense of the input as a whole sequence, rather than first trying to break it apart into pieces. This is similar to how modern speech recognition systems recognize audio input…

Once you scan a document and upload it to Drive, you just need to right-click on it and select ‘Open with’ -> ‘Google Docs’.

Google adds that you don’t even need to set your language preference, Drive will automatically detect it when uploading a document.

You can access the OCR features both on the web and through the Google Drive app for Android.

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Android will soon continually scan for malicious apps even after installation

Google just made some announcements about how it’s beefing up security on Android. In a post on the Official Android blog, Android Security Engineer Rich Cannings announced Google is introducing improvements to how the “Verify apps” process works. While Android already scans apps at the time of installation, even ones outside of Google Play, it will soon continually scan devices to keep an eye on apps that after installation. 
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Google Drive Android app updated with ‘scan’ for storing physical docs, improved UI, and more

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Google announced on its Google Drive blog today that it is rolling out an updated Google Drive app for Android that includes a couple notable new features.

The app’s UI has been overhauled and now displays your Drive files in a familiar grid style view:

You can swipe between files to see large previews that let you quickly review and discover the information you’re looking for. And if you want to keep some Drive files on your Android device, you’ll now be able to “download a copy” from the actions menu inside settings.

Another big update included in the latest version of Drive for Android is the ability to ‘scan’ and store physical documents as PDFs. The new scan option will allow users to snap photos of documents and save them within Drive as a PDF. Thanks to Optical Character Recognition, you’ll also be able to search for the scanned docs using keywords.

The update includes a number of other improvements as well including the ability to download a copy of your files in Drive your device’s local storage, improvements to editing features in Google Sheets, and much more:
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