If you’re a PC user, you’ve likely got a printer on your desk and a scanner of some sort lying around as well.  Some printers are now printer/scanner/fax machines that can perform a multitude of tasks.  But did you know that your scanner can do more than just copy pictures or scan important hardcopy documents onto your computer as an image?  

With Nuance’s Ominpage 16 you can do much, much more than that.  Omnipage 16 is an optical character recognition (OCR) application that has the ability to recognize scanned text and represent that text to users in an editable format.  What this means is that you can scan in your marriage certificate, change your spouse’s name, print out the altered document, and give them a mild heart attack.

But beyond practical jokes, Omnipage 16 is a powerful computer program that can save you countless hours of typing hardcopy documents into your computer.  Perhaps you’ve got an unfinished, hand-typed manuscript you haven’t worked on in years, but you just don’t want to break out the old Olivetti typewriter.  Since you’d want the entire story to be on the computer, you would have to sit in front of it and retype page after page of your typewritten story, taking days or possibly weeks to complete.  With Omnipage, you simply scan the page with your scanner (or even take a digital picture of it) and the recognition software reads the page and within literally seconds, you will have a nearly identical, editable document displayed on your monitor – one that can be altered and saved at your leisure.

Omnipage 16 is not just for home users – businesses can benefit greatly from its surprisingly powerful batch processing software.  Oftentimes businesses will have years and years worth of paperwork that must be saved for predetermined lengths of time, but space inevitably becomes a problem.  Boxes upon boxes or old papers can be scanned in one after another, formatted into one of several possible file types then saved and compiled automatically.  This can save a business thousands of dollars and manhours – in this respect, Omnipage 16 can pay for itself inside of a week.  And Omnipage 16 has the added benefit of being smart enough to find sensitive or confidential words that you specify and blacken them out automatically.

Let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of the program.  The software installation from the CD went as smoothly as you would expect, with little deviation.  Omnipage 16 recognized my scanner quickly and was ready to use in just a few minutes.  There have been reports of common, popular scanners not being recognized by Omnipage, but a little bit of patience and running the diagnostic program usually solves that problem.  Nuance has excellent support on its website, so installation should not be a problem for most people.  Now we’ll move onto Omnipage’s appearance.

Nuance claims that Omnipage 16 has an easy-to-use, intuitive graphic user interface (GUI).  While I have a good bit of experience with computers and applications, I did not find this to be the case.  It may be intuitive if you’ve used Omnipage or some of Nuance’s other programs in the past, but for the typical home user, the Omnipage 16 GUI is far from “intuitive”.  That being said, the program includes several help guides in the case that you get stuck and don’t know where to turn.  And, again, Nuance’s support center is very helpful.

The biggest problem with most OCR software is the editing layout.  “Keeping everything where it is and where it should be” is of paramount importance when editing a scanned document.  You don’t want words ending where they shouldn’t or starting outside the margins.  Omnipage 16 does a pretty good job of this when compared to other OCRs, but it is far from perfect.  As for the actual recognition of words and letters, Nuance claims its software is nearly 100% accurate.  It does an excellent job, but 100% accuracy?  Not quite – but “nearly” is their claim and “nearly” it is.  For example, Omnipage 16 sometimes has trouble distinguishing between a “t” and an “f”.  The words “if” and “it” got misused on several attempts I made – even though the software told me the scan was 100% accurate.  The reason it claimed 100%?  Both are legitimate words so even the program’s proofreader can miss them – which necessitates reading the document through yourself to check it for errors; an unfortunate shortcoming with just about all OCR software.

One area where Omnipage 16 excels is that of speed.  It took barely one second for the software to read and recognize the text of one full page after the scan was complete.  But that page was text and text alone – how does Omnipage 16 perform when the page has a mixture of text and graphics?  Not too bad, actually.  It took a little over ten seconds to read and recognize a page with mostly text but two pictures as well.  If your page has graphics, you might need to inform the program just what areas of the document you want to treat as text, but for most users this is a minor inconvenience – especially when you consider the other, more lacking OCR software out there.  Omnipage 16 also had some trouble properly recreating colored text as well as word spacing and indenting, but all things considered, this are inconsequential issues.  Nuance is always working to improve Omnipage and most of these problems are being addressed for future versions.

Probably the coolest feature of Omnipage 16 is its ability to convert text to voice.  This means you can scan in a text document and the computer will read it back to you in a pleasant, surprisingly accurate male voice.  Far from robotic speech, the voice synthesizer software adds tones and inflections that you might not expect from a product of this type or this price.  Beyond that, Omnipage 16 allows you to save that synthesized voice document as a WAV file for audio reproduction.  There are more than 30 savable formats for the documents themselves, which include XML, PPS, DOC, RTF and PDF as well as the latest Office 2007 DOCX format and WordPerfect X3.

If you have a scanner, you should check out this software.  If you own a business, you should BUY this software.  Omnipage 16 is an inexpensive, powerful program that can save you time and quite possibly, money.  From scanning in old tax forms, invoices and statements to finally finishing that novel that’s been collecting dust for fifteen years, Omnipage 16 can help you do the job and do it in a quick, efficient manner.