OCR Buddy

About

OCR Buddy grabs text from anything on your screen — a code block, a paragraph, a formula, or a table — and reads it entirely on your device. Drag-select a region of any page and the text appears in Chrome's side panel, right next to the captured image so you can verify it. No pixel ever leaves your computer.

Classic OCR, not generative OCR. Large vision-language models top the benchmarks, then invent fluent but wrong text the moment the image gets unclear — and for code, numbers, IDs, or prices a confidently-wrong transcription is worse than none. OCR Buddy makes the opposite bet: it uses detection plus CTC recognition (PP-OCRv5 on ONNX Runtime Web), has no language prior, and transcribes only the glyphs actually present. When it can't read something, it leaves a blank or flags low confidence — it never makes up a sentence.

Three modes, switchable after capture:
- Text / Code — prose or code, with a Code view that restores indentation and adds syntax highlighting.
- Formula → LaTeX — one equation into LaTeX, rendered with KaTeX beside the source crop so you can check it.
- Table → Markdown — one table into a clean grid, rebuilt from word-box geometry (works on borderless tables too).

Faithful by design: the captured crop sits above the extracted text every time, low-confidence words are underlined, and an ambiguous region yields empty output rather than invented filler.

Private by architecture: there is no server, no account, no telemetry, and no analytics. The OCR models are bundled inside the extension and run in a local offscreen worker, so it works fully offline. The only network use is Chrome downloading the extension itself.

Free and open source (MIT). Manifest V3 · Chrome 124+ · WebGPU-accelerated with a multi-threaded WASM fallback.