CompuServe Messages

Rich, <<As a matter of fact, in repeated head-to-head competitions, keyboarding proves to be the most economical and effective method for conversion, *especially* for the big jobs.>> I'd be interested in where you've seen those competitions, and how to get involved in the competition. We primarily do OCR, and have staff who proof and tag, and write code to automate some of it, and in audits, come out head to head with keyboarding. Even on the "big jobs" as you put it. I've seen many "competitions" where straight OCR was compared to keyboarding, and the keying came out ahead, which makes since when they double key it. However, when we throw in the things that we specialize in, using people to proof and writing code to automate much of the tagging, I'd compete against keyboarding any day. It also GREATLY depends on what OCR package is being used. When I first started this company, I had a little HP and was using the high-end Calera stuff, and almost went bankrupt. Using Kurzweil (now Xerox) products has upped our *starting* accuracy, so that adding people and custom code writing has enabled us to compete directly with the offshore keying houses. You'd also be amazed at what can be done with a good service bureau (like us of course <g>) in terms of making the hard copy OCRable. On big jobs where skew and speckle is a problem, we will scan images off of a high-speed image scanner at 20 pages/minute, run some deskew and despeckle code on the resulting images, and then feed those cleaned up images to the Kurzweil unit for OCR. Bottom line is don't count out on-shore service bureaus for text-intensive jobs. Most places here in the states that have their collective heads screwed on straight are *not* relying on straight OCR, but rather like us use humans to proofread the OCR output, and can usually guarantee the same, if not higher, accuracy rates that the off-shore keyboarding houses can, for the same money. And we are in the same time zone and espeaka de lingo. Lisa