Real-time talking OCR

The vOICe for Android includes live text recognition with speech, meant for reading brief messages, newspaper headlines and labels. For reading whole pages of print you should revert to dedicated OCR (optical character recognition) packages. Soundscapes from The vOICe and any recognized text sound simultaneously, such that you can use the soundscapes to center the text in the camera view for better recognition. The soundscapes also indicate font size through the text rhythm and the angle of lines of print through changes in pitch. The vOICe refreshes the spoken text every few seconds to track changes in the camera view. This can mean that not all text is spoken before the next refresh occurs, then cutting the currently spoken text short. If that happens, simply looking away from the text can help to hear all the recognized text in the camera view. Any recognized text is automatically copied to the system clipboard, such that you can readily paste it into other apps if desired.

By default, The vOICe applies low resolution live OCR to keep you from being distracted too often by text appearing somewhere in your environmental view, and only switches automatically to high resolution live OCR once some large font text is detected in order to get more detail if available. However, if you are on the lookout for some text you can force The vOICe to apply high resolution live OCR continuously by toggling the continuous high resolution OCR option with key capital 'O' or the voice command "OCR".

Support for blind photography and third-party OCR

Some blind people like to take photographs to document situations much like other people do, or they apply it as an art form. The soundscapes of The vOICe can thus be used as a kind of auditory viewfinder to let blind photographers frame their subsequent high resolution photographs. Pressing the "p" key saves a high resolution photograph in JPEG format to the /vOICe folder (under the root of your storage device) with a UNIX timestamp in the filename, e.g., "vOICe_1155742184123.jpg". Moreover, provided that you have headphones connected, you will have after taking a photograph hear a beep and then have a few seconds to speak a descriptive label for your photograph, which is then through speech recognition included as plain text in the photo log file /vOICe/photolog.txt. If Exif tags are enabled (default is enabled in the "Other settings" menu), it is also stored as an Exif image description tag in your photo file such that it can never be lost. Furthermore, the label is copied to the system clipboard for optional use in other apps. The skin color filter toggled by key "s" may be used to help frame a face in portrait photography, while the tactile graphics mode provides an alternative means for checking the view composition. More information on blind photography can be found at the  Blind with Camera School of Photography.

Stored photographs show up in the standard Android Gallery under "vOICe". By default, Exif time and location tags (geotags) are also embedded in the saved photographs, just as with Android's built-in camera app, but you can disable Exif tagging via the "Other settings" menu. Stored photographs may also be used as input for third-party OCR engines to recognize text in images. There exist numerous commercial OCR applications for Android, including for instance  Scanthing OCR and  ABBYY TextGrabber + Translator.