Optical character recognition (OCR) is the bridge between physical documents and editable text, and it is the workflow that most often gets stuck behind a paywall or an upload form. The OCR Tools hub on Ai2Done gathers every OCR-capable utility on the site — extracting text from photos, from scanned PDFs, from screenshots, even from the embedded images inside larger PDFs — and runs them locally so passport scans, ID cards, medical records and confidential contracts never need to be uploaded.
The flagship is the Image to Text tool: drop a photo of a sign, document, whiteboard or receipt and receive editable text within a few seconds. The engine is a Tesseract-derived model compiled to WebAssembly, supporting 100+ languages including English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and many more. Language detection is automatic for the most common scripts; for mixed-script documents you can pick the language explicitly.
For PDFs, the Extract Text tool handles both text-layer PDFs (where the text is already encoded) and scanned PDFs (where each page is an image that needs OCR). For the scanned case the extraction can take a few seconds per page on a typical laptop; for text-layer PDFs the result is instantaneous. The Extract Images tool is the complement: pull every embedded image out of a PDF for separate processing or archival. Combined, these three tools cover almost every "get text out of a non-text source" workflow.
OCR accuracy depends heavily on input quality. Crisp scans, good lighting, no perspective distortion and at least 300 DPI all help; phone-scanned documents at an angle on a busy background are the hardest case. The output is plain text by default; you can copy it, save it as TXT, or paste into a Word document for formatted editing. For PDFs you can also convert to Word via the PDF Converter hub, which preserves heading hierarchy where possible.
Privacy is the structural advantage. Major SaaS OCR services upload your images to GPU clusters; for confidential documents (HR records, medical reports, legal evidence, ID copies) that exposure is often unacceptable. Ai2Done's pipeline runs entirely inside your browser sandbox — the image is read, processed by Wasm, and the text is returned without ever touching the network. Pair the OCR hub with the PDF Tools hub for working with the extracted text and the Image Tools hub for pre-processing scans (compression, deskew, contrast) before OCR.