Prizmo Go › Text Grabber

Many apps offer a new take on existing learning materials.  Interactive books, self-marking worksheets, and revision games, for instance.  Schools, however, have a vast range of traditional learning material and more is produced over time.  Instead of being an educational app in its own right, Prizmo Go unlocks access to traditional resources as well as other printed materials for those who have difficulty in using textbooks, worksheets and written material.  Using this app, printed words can be scanned, converted using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and then they can be read out by the app or sent to another text reader or adapted elsewhere so that the size and style are easier to read.  

So how well does this app perform its primary purpose of capturing text from printed material? 

Surprisingly well is the answer.  

Capturing the text is easy using the device's camera or by importing from photos already stored.  For those with shaky hands, the app offers some image stabilisation to help capture text clearly.  

The presence and location of text in captured images is recognised very quickly and this is shown by the appearance of lines underneath the words.  When these lines fully mark out the text, a captured image is likely to be successful.  The lines remain in place over the photo in the app and show the locations where the user can highlight text to be added to the captured text.  This is held in its own section at the bottom of the page.  It is very intuitive and easy to fine-tune which text is captured.

In this review, three different styles of text were used:  a newspaper article which was in English but included non-English names;  a school textbook paragraph; and a paragraph written in my own, not that neat,  handwriting.

The two printed-text OCR methods each did well.  The on-device OCR is more than good enough in most circumstances.  The text was accurately recognised and presented.  It dealt well with multiple columns of text and kept the associated lines grouped with no inaccurate run-ons.  There were a few minor inaccuracies in letter detection that could be explained by the imperfect nature of the paper texture where the word appeared or where numbers were mixed in with words. The resulting text was, though, fully understandable.  

Using the cloud-based OCR increased the accuracy, particularly for those errors caused by punctuation or the use of numbers among words.  For those who would struggle with using context to derive meanings or who lack the critical skills to mentally correct the minor errors that might arise in the on-device OCR, this would be the preferred OCR option.

Considering the handwritten text with which the app was tasked, low accuracy was anticipated, but the app far exceeded what was expected.  The handwritten script was not carefully printed but was written without regard to the test. It included a mix of cursive and printed text, numbers and words, and was not written on lined paper.  In one place, the pen failed and the letters were re-emphasised by going over them again.  It was recognised perfectly.

Particularly with handwriting, individual experiences might differ.  Tested against a vast array of writing styles it is conceivable that some will work better than others.  The tests done in this review show that if your handwriting is readable to a human then it will be readable to the app.  It would be unreasonable to expect an app to translate writing that people can barely make out.

Printed text is more consistent, but again, some typefaces might offer worse results than others.  Marks, fading, and creases can cause issues but in tests these were often only single-letter errors, leaving the word as a whole, readable.  The biggest danger with this type of error is that if it changes one word into another valid word that could change the entire meaning of a sentence.  Particularly in the cloud-based solution, this is likely to be a very rare experience, though, and was not encountered in these tests.  Artificial intelligence is not yet perfect, though, so the possibility needs to be kept in mind.

Some people who might be best served by the Prizmo Go's goals are also those that can struggle to use screen-based devices.  To that end, the device employs the built-in Voiceover functions of iOS devices to describe what is happening on screen.

In addition to some of the more obvious uses for a screen recognition, such as the reworking of text into a different format or to help those with sight or literacy limitations, Prizmo Go can also be used in language learning as it has a translation feature that supports 59 different languages.  A learner stuck on a phrase in a textbook can use the app to translate it.

This review has used the fully unlocked app and not all of the app's functions are available in the free version.  For many people, they may find that the free version does all they need and so is an ideal download.  You can check the accuracy and ease of use for yourself in this version.  Two other options exist whereby you can purchase the ability to export text for a one-off price or you can take out a subscription to unlock every feature in full.

Recognising that many schools take advantage of the Apple Volume Purchasing Program, which cannot be used with in-app purchases and subscriptions, the developers have made a purchasable school version which has the text-exporting option incorporated, although not the ability to use the cloud-based OCR.  For the vast majority of users, this will be all that they will need so it is an excellent option for those buying in volume

Prizmo Go's ease of use and effective performance make it a great app to support those who struggle with the written word.  Those with vision difficulties or dyslexia can capture text from sources that have not been designed with their needs in mind.  A great strategy for schools would be to have the free version on all devices they own, the school version on devices allocated to provide support to specific students that need it, and if necessary, take out the full version if and when a specific student's needs require it.   Try out the free version now and see how effective it is.

You can download Prizmo Go › Text Grabber on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.