List of OCR apps for Android, iPhone, and browsers

A process that allows users to have documents that weren’t originally detectable or considered flat, now be editable for features such as highlighting, note-taking, and Text-to-Speech. Learn more on OCR.

With the need of these features during remote learning, we’ve composed a list for all of CUNY to take advantage of. Some of these solutions strictly pertain to CUNY Faculty.

Recommended list of Optical Character Recognition applications for Android, iPhone, iPad, and browsers.

Application Name

Features

For who?

License Type

Platforms


Office Lens
  • Convert to PDF
  • Immersive Reader
  • Image pre-processing
  • ID scanning
  • text editor
  • camera scanner
  • Formats supported: PNG, JPEG,PDF

Faculty/Staff/Students – All CUNY Faculty, Staff, and Students can get access to the premium version by using your CUNYFirst login. This license is provided by the Microsoft 365 CUNY license.

Free and Paid

Android, iPhone and Windows desktops.

Adobe Scan

  • Camera scanner
  • Color contrast changer
  • Manual and auto cropping
  • Open files from your local phone
  • Formats supported: PNG, JPEG,PDF

Faculty/Staff – This is available for all CUNY faculty and staff that have created an Adobe account with their campus. Please contact your IT department for information on accessing a license.
Student – free version available with limited feature access.

Free and Paid

Android, iPhone

Text Fairy

  • Camera scanner
  • Text-to-Speech
  • Convert OCR to text
  • Google Translate
  • Export to PDF
  • Open files from your local phone
  • Formats supported: PNG, JPEG,PDF

Students, Faculty, and Staff.

Free

Android

ABBYY FineScanner AI

  • Camera scanner
  • Open files from your local phone
  • Formats supported: PNG, JPEG,PDF

Students, Faculty, and Staff

Free and Paid

Android, iPhone

A picture containing shirt

Description automatically generated

CamScanner

  • Camera scanner
  • Convert OCR to text
  • Open files from your local phone
  • Sync from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box
  • Formats supported: PNG, JPEG,PDF

Students,Faculty,and Staff.

Free – limited feature access
Paid – monthly/yearly subscription. 10GB cloud storage, and more.
Visit Camscanner pricing

Android, iOS, iPad

Copyfish – Free OCR Software

  • OCR images, videos from the web
  • Desktop OCR screenshot available – extra software required

Students ,Faculty, Staff.

Free – primary features available
Paid – Pro features like Google Translate and better OCR
Visit Copyfish Pricing

Browser extension- Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge

Desktop – Windows, Mac, Linux

OCRSpace

Upload supports PDF,PNG,JPG

Students, Faculty, Staff

Free and Paid

Website – Supports all browsers