Tess2Speech: An Intelligent Character Recognition-To-Speech Application for Android Using Google's Tesseract Optical Character Recognition Engine

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.