In my increasingly paperless law practice, most of the documents that I need are already in PDF or some other electronic format, so when I need to get some text out of a document, I can typically just select that text using my computer or iOS device. But sometimes I find myself working with a paper document — perhaps a single sheet of paper, perhaps a magazine, book, etc. — and I need to get some text out of that document so that I can work with it. If it is short enough I can just retype it manually, but that is a pain for longer text. Prizmo Go, an app which was released in 2017, has as its single focus the task of getting text from a paper document into your iPhone (or iPad) so that you can work with it. Use the app to take a picture of the document, the app does an OCR to read the text, and then the app gives you the text. The app itself is free, but there are some in-app purchases, discussed below. The developer gave me a one-month Premium Plan account at no cost (which normally costs $0.99) so that I could see all of the features. The app works well and I can recommend it.
Background
The developer of Prizmo Go is Creaceed, a company in Belgium that has been making iOS apps since 2008, the same year that the App Store opened. Back in 2009, I reviewed Prizmo, an app which scans documents and creates PDFs, and that app is still around today. So these folks have a ton of experience using the iPhone to digitize documents.
Taking a picture
To start using the app, the first step is to use the app to take a picture of some text in a document. As you are pointing your iPhone at the document, the app will underline all words that it can recognize, so you can see if you need to adjust your iPhone to get it in a position where all of the text that you want is visible and understood. This is a neat augmented reality-type feature that makes a lot of sense.
Recognizing the words and turning them into text
Once you press the button, Prizmo Go snaps the picture and shows you the picture at the top and the text at the bottom.
If you see errors, you can fix them. For example, in the above scan, I can see that the word "to" isn't correctly recognized in the second line. Just tap in the text field to fix the text, and you can even make the text portion bigger so that you can see more of the text at once.
If you don't need all of the words in the photo, use your finger to swipe across the image and select the text that you need, which is highlighted in blue. (Non-selected text is just underlined.)
The app can recognize words in one of two ways. You can use the free built-in OCR functions to have the app itself try to read the words. Or, in the app settings, you can turn on Cloud OCR which sends the picture to a server and returns, almost instantly, even more accurate results. You need to pay for the Cloud OCR service. One way to do it is to purchase a premium plan for one month for $0.99 or one year for $7.99. Or you can pay $0.99 for 100 uses or $4.99 for 1000 uses. There is also a free 10-pack so that you can try it out.
Use the text
I suspect that most attorneys and other folks using this app will want to do something with the text once it is captured, such as copy-and-paste it into another app, an email, a note, etc. To do so in Prizmo Go, you need to pay. If you purchase that $1/month or $8/year premium pack, the ability to export is included. Otherwise, you need to pay a $4.99 to turn on the export feature.
For most folks, this means that you have a choice in how you pay for this app. You can spend $4.99 to enable export and perhaps also pay $0.99 for 100 uses of the Cloud OCR feature — or just skip the more accurate Cloud OCR feature and use the still pretty darn accurate built-in OCR. Or you can pay $1/month or $8/year to have unlimited use of this app. In other words, you get to choose whether you prefer the pay up front model or the subscription model for using this app.
Once the export feature is turned on, you can do something with the text, such as copy it to the clipboard, send it to an email message, etc.
Other languages
For many attorneys, the operations discussed above are all that you will need. But if you find yourself needing to work with other languages, the app can handle that too. Some languages are handled with the built-in OCR, others require the Cloud OCR package. The Cloud OCR service can recognize languages automatically.
The app can recognize 22 languages and can translate to 59 languages. In the following example, I scanned a legal decision from a French court, then I had Prizmo translate the text into English.
Other features
There are other features available in this app, although I don't think that they are features that I will need. For example, the app can read text out loud, which could be useful if your vision is impaired. (The app also has lots of voice over accessibility features, useful for folks with limited or no vision.) The app can also detect certain types of data — such as email addresses, phone numbers, URLs, etc. — and you can act upon that data, such as calling a phone number.
Conclusion
Prizmo Go does its job very well. If you ever need to take some words on paper and then get them into your iPhone or iPad (and from there, you might send them to your computer), Prizmo Go has you covered. You can often do something similar by using an app which creates PDF documents and then does an OCR, but the Prizmo Go app is more efficient because it focuses on the task of getting you the text that you need as quickly as possible.
The in-app purchases are a little confusing at first, but I really like that the company gives you the choice. You can either pay $5 to use the app to export text, plus pay for OCR whenever you need it in $1 or $5 chunks (or don't pay for Cloud OCR at all). Or you can opt for the subscription model of $1/month or $8/year, which gives you access to every feature in the app.
Click here to get Prizmo Go (free): 
