What does Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allow a software to do?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology enables software to interpret and extract text from images of documents. This includes recognizing printed characters, letters, and numbers on physical documents, whether scanned or photographed. The primary function of OCR is to convert these visual inputs into machine-readable text, which can then be edited, searched, or processed further by computers. This capability is particularly beneficial for digitizing printed materials, making them accessible for various applications such as digitization of books, automatic data entry, and more.

The other options reflect different functionalities that are not related to OCR. For example, converting audio files into text involves audio transcription, which is a separate process entirely. Reducing image file size pertains to image compression techniques, and translating documents requires language translation software, both of which are different from what OCR achieves.