Text Recognition (OCR)
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. With the Cloud-based API, you can also extract text from documents, which you can use to increase accessibility or translate documents.
Lose It!
Since 2008, Lose It! has helped more than 30 million people lose over 50 million pounds. The app helps users manage their diets by making food logging as easy as possible, and their product teams are always looking for new ways to make things even simpler.
The team behind Lose It! first introduced Snap It, an object-recognition algorithm designed to help users log their favorite foods just by taking a photo. But the high computational cost of the algorithm necessitated the use of a GPU server, which meant they weren’t able to make the experience available in real time.
Around the same time, the team also wanted to add a nutrition label-scanning feature, but the server analysis time was only marginally faster than if the user just entered the information themselves. Plus, because variable cell network speeds and signals could make or break the user experience, they weren’t able to guarantee consistent performance.
The Lose It! team knew their users would love both features, but only if they could make them fast enough to offer the experience in real time. So what could they do to speed things up?