In the leapfrog game of professional optical character recognition (OCR) packages, ScanSoft jumps ahead of the competition with OmniPage Pro 14.0 Office. Recognition accuracy and page-format retention are incrementally improved over its predecessor, but OmniPage Pro 14.0 Office’s support features show the largest improvement. Anyone with batch and repetitive scanning tasks will appreciate OmniPage’s Batch Manager and work flows, which streamline procedures. Bar-code cover sheets for hard-copy and electronic documents can automatically signal OmniPage to launch a specified work flow and send you an e-mail message when the job is finished. Other enhancements include expanded PDF support and better text-to-speech for voice read-back. You can even use speech recognition to control work flows or make proofreading corrections. And in spite of all these additions, OmniPage remains easy to use.
ScanSoft packs a number of new and enhanced features into OmniPage Pro 14.0 Office, each one valuable to the document conversion process. We tested OmniPage with various documents, and the recognition accuracy and formatting retention were noticeably better than those of its predecessor as well as those of Abbyy FineReader 7.0. In particular, a magazine page with two columns of text mortised around a circular image came out well in Word format and was nearly identical to the original. This was clearly better than the results obtained with FineReader.
Perhaps more important than accuracy are some of OmniPage’s new features. Not only is its text-to-speech feature (for voice read-back) much improved, you can now use it to generate WAV files that you can record to an audio CD for later playback. It’s like having your own electronic assistant to read aloud the latest sales report or research during your morning drive.