Capture via OCR-Scanning to Scratchpad

Interact's Scratchpad is useful in converting any text on your device into contact information, but what if the contact information you want to capture is on a paper? We run into contact information on business cards, letterhead and other printed documentation all the time and no one want to re-type that information.

Enter Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR is used to recognize text in an image/photo and convert it to text. Interact does not directly support OCR, but works great with any app which does OCR and supports standard iOS share sheets.  We've been using a free app call OCR Scanner, but if you have other scanning apps that do OCR they will likely work as well.

 

Steps

• Download free OCR Scanner app from App Store. (Other OCR apps with access to the standard iOS Share sheet will work as well.)
• Launch OCR app
• Snap photo of contact information.  Attempt to crop image to only the useful text as best as possible.
• Let OCR do it's text conversion and show a preview.
• Tap Share button in upper right, then the Contact Scratchpad action extension.  You may need to enable this extension using the "More" button if you have not already enabled it.
• Make any necessary clean up of text in the Scratchpad, and tap next to create the contact.

For more information on using the Scratchpad, watch this screencast or read the Scratchpad documentation.