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Introduction

The OCR Local Server activity package (known in akaBot Studio as RCA.Activities.OCRLocalServer) provides activities and engines for optical character recognition (OCR) and text extraction. It enables robots to perform OCR-based screen scraping, locate text on screens or inside images, and interact with user interface elements using localized or cloud-based OCR technologies.

Core Activities​

Workflows in akaBot Studio utilize this package to locate, extract, and interact with text via OCR. The package includes:

OCR Scope​

  • OCR Scope: A container activity that establishes the OCR context and configuration (such as the default OCR Engine) for all nested OCR activities.

OCR Text Extraction & Search​

  • Load Image: Loads an image file from a specified path so that other activities can perform OCR operations on it.
  • Get OCR Text: Extracts text from an indicated UI element or image using the OCR screen scraping method.
  • Get OCR Text With Anchor: Extracts text relative to an anchor string from an indicated UI element or image.
  • Find OCR Text Position: Searches for a string and returns a UIElement representing its position on the screen.
  • Text Exists OCR: Checks if a specific text string exists within a target UI element or image.

OCR Mouse Interactions​

  • Click OCR Text: Searches for a specific string using OCR and performs a mouse click on it.
  • Hover OCR Text: Searches for a specific string using OCR and hovers the mouse cursor over it.

Nested OCR Engines​

OCR-based activities (such as Click OCR Text, Get OCR Text, etc.) rely on nested OCR engines to scan images and recognize characters. The following engines can be dragged and dropped into the OCR activities:

  • akaBot OCR: akaBot's proprietary OCR engine optimized for structured text extraction.
  • Tesseract OCR: An open-source local OCR engine integrated by default.
  • Google Cloud OCR: A cloud-based engine leveraging Google Cloud Vision API.
  • Microsoft Azure OCR: A cloud-based engine utilizing Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API.
  • Microsoft Windows 10 OCR: A local OCR engine built into the Windows 10/11 operating system.