Tag: computers

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Making An AI-Powered Business Card Reader

Writing a business card reader can be tedious. I first tried using Tesseract, an open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. But besides OCR, you still need to segment the images, do optical character recognition (OCR) then identify text patterns for names, title, phones, emails, etc and extract them. Quite a lot of work if you have a big stack of business cards to go through.

But thankfully, technology and especially AI has come a long way and we can use widely available AI engines such as OpenAI’s to make the job easier… unbelievably easier. In this post, we’ll go through the whole thing from start to finish.

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Making A Business Card Reader Using Tesseract

Business cards, those little cards with your contact information. I remember when I got my first box, I felt like a complete office professional! Giving and receiving them was a stringent ritual. I even had business card holders and organizers. But that was a long time ago. Do people still use those?!?

Well, apparently they still do. Yesterday, I got a big stack from my wife from her Singapore trip and she asked if I can encode the data into a spreadsheet. So me being me, instead of spending some time encoding, I spent a bit more time coding.

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64-Bit

64-bit processor technology has been with us for quite some time. The first 64-bit processor, the MIPS R4000, came out in 1991. Back then they were expensive and relagated to server duty. Intel’s first 64-bit processor, the Itanium, came out in 2001 followed by AMD’s Opteron/AMD64 in 2003 starting the move to mainstream computing.

Now, the technology is practically everywhere, even desktops and laptops, with the Intel and AMD having multiple 64-bit processor families. And yet a lot of people still don’t know this. They have this impression that all desktops are 32-bit and only servers are 64-bit. But that’s not the case anymore.

Oh, and if  you do have a 64-bit machine, do install a 64-bit OS,  so you can harness your machine’s full potential. You wouldn’t want to have 8GB or RAM onboard only to find that your OS can’t use it.