Abstract:
Tes2Speech is an Android mobile application for recognizing handwritten texts
and optionally convert it to speech. By training Google’s Tesseract, which is a
free open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Engine, to recognize hand-
written texts, I created an alternative for Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)
Engine that are proprietary and expensive. OCR Engines’ main purpose is to con-
vert scanned documents with computer printed texts into an editable and machine
encoded text. But by improving an OCR into ICR to recognize handwritten texts
and integrating it into a mobile application in this day and age, it greatly improves
its usability. It can help speech-impaired people to communicate, help children
to recognize the proper pronunciation of words they write, etc. Thus, creating a
free and non-proprietary handwriting-to-speech application that is accessible for
everyone, and will be very useful for those who are looking for a free, portable,
and reliable alternative to ICR, OCR, and other related expensive communication
devices. Tes2Speech includes a user-friendly Tesseract trainer desktop application
in order for the user to personalize Tess2Speech for their own handwritings.
