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Local AI

Local AI for read a scan

Local OCR in 2026 comes in two sizes. Tesseract and PaddleOCR are small engines that read clean print on almost any computer. olmOCR 2, a Qwen2.5-VL fine-tune from the Allen Institute, and Qwen2.5-VL 7B itself read harder documents, including tables, and they want about 6 GB. We link to each maker's install guide.

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Questions people actually ask

Is this the same as transcription?

Transcription turns speech into text. OCR turns a picture of writing into text. A photo of a letter is OCR. A voice memo is transcription.

Which one should a beginner pick?

Tesseract when the page is clean print and the computer is small. olmOCR when the scan is a real document and the machine has about 8 GB free for the model.

Distinct answers

Search engines see only the computers where this job's answer is genuinely different. The other computers stay on the site and point here.