Text Recognitionplat_iosplat_android

With ML Kit's text recognition APIs, you can recognize text in any Latin-based language (and more, with Cloud-based text recognition).

Text recognition can automate tedious data entry for credit cards, receipts, and business cards, or help organize photos. With the Cloud-based API, you can extract text from documents, which you can use to increase accessibility or translate documents. Apps can even keep track of real-world objects, such as by reading the numbers on trains.

iOS Android

Choose between on-device and Cloud APIs

	On-device	Cloud
Pricing	Free	Free for first 1000 uses of this feature per month: see Pricing
Ideal use cases	Real-time processing—ideal for a camera or video feed	High-accuracy text recognition Document scanning See the Cloud Vision API demo.
Language support	Recognizes Latin characters	Recognizes and identifies a broad range of languages and special characters

Example results

Photo: Kai Schreiber / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0

On-device

Text	`Please`
Bounding Polygon	(355, 371) (471, 371) (471, 415) (355, 415)

Text	`Walk on the Grass`
Bounding Polygon	(388, 424) (711, 384) (718, 439) (395, 480)

Text	`Metropolitan Toronto Parks`
Bounding Polygon	(361, 532) (651, 489) (656, 521) (365, 563)

Cloud

Text	`Please\nWalk on the Grass\nMetropolitan Toronto Parks\n`
Locale	en
Bounding Polygon	(358, 368), (710, 368), (710, 570), (358, 570)

Text	`Please`
Bounding Polygon	(358, 368), (458, 368), (458, 415), (358, 415)

Text	`Walk`
Bounding Polygon	(358, 423), (458, 412), (465, 478), (365, 489)

Text	`on`
Bounding Polygon	(483, 410), (519, 406), (526, 471), (490, 475)

Text	`the`
Bounding Polygon	(545, 403), (601, 397), (608, 463), (552, 469)

Text	`Grass`
Bounding Polygon	(605, 396), (702, 386), (709, 451), (612, 462)

Text	`Metropolitan`
Bounding Polygon	(358, 535), (487, 513), (493, 549), (364, 571)

Text	`Toronto`
Bounding Polygon	(502, 511), (576, 499), (582, 534), (508, 547)

Text	`Parks`
Bounding Polygon	(593, 496), (647, 487), (653, 521), (599, 531)