• sweng@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    The issue is not sending, it is receiving. With a fax you need to do some OCR to extract the text, which you then can feed into e.g an AI.

      • sweng@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        At horrendous expense, yes. Using it for OCR makes little sense. And compared to just sending the text directly, even OCR is expensive.

        • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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          5 months ago

          I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

          • GenosseFlosse@lemmy.nz
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            5 months ago

            OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70’s or 80’s to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.

            • sweng@programming.dev
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              5 months ago

              Doing OCR in a very specific format, in a small specific area, using a set of only 9 characters, and having a list of all possible results, is not really the same problem at all.

            • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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              5 months ago

              I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.

            • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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              5 months ago

              I wouldn’t do it on my phone. 🙄

              What I’m saying is that it would probably be fairly easy to incorporate an already existing technology in to an AI.