Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:42786 alt.fax:418
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!coherent!dplatt
From: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,alt.fax
Subject: Faxmodem/OCR combination... is it workable?
Message-ID: <39963@improper.coherent.com>
Date: 21 Nov 89 22:30:28 GMT
Followup-To: poster
Distribution: comp
Organization: Coherent Thought Inc., Palo Alto CA
Lines: 47

One of our customer-service people has posed the following problem:

Some of our customers are having difficulty getting problem reports,
execution traces, and so forth to us in a timely fashion.  They must
dump the files onto a Sun cartridge tape (an operation with which many
of the customers are not familiar or comfortable), and then FedEx the
tape to us.  Due to bureaucratic snafus in the customer organizations,
it frequently takes several days to process the FedEx paperwork and have
the packages picked up.  This is resulting in unfriendly delays in our
ability to resolve the problems.

Unfortunately, we aren't in a position to be able to apply a software
patch to the customer organizations :-(.  Instead, we need to find some
way of getting the reports to us which doesn't require the sending of
tapes.

In order to reproduce the problems here, we usually need to have the
problem transcripts in a machine-readable form.  I suggested that they
be email'ed to us... but, unfortunately, the customers in question
either have no email systems at all, or have in-house email which
doesn't speak to the outside world.  The people we're dealing with are
not Unix/Mac/telecom gurus, and probably wouldn't be comfortable with
trying to run XMODEM file-transfers, or anything of that sort.

Next idea... fax.  We can receive problem reports by fax without any
trouble... no paperwork is needed.  However, this forces our
customer-support folks to read the fax and type the transcript into our
debugging system by hand... not much fun.

I wonder whether it would be possible to equip a Mac with a fax-modem,
and an OCR software package, and automate this process almost completely?  Has
anyone tried this combination?  Has it worked?  Would it work better
with an external scanner?  or not as well?  How much hand-correction of
the scanned text is needed?

If you have used this sort of combination, I'd very much appreciate
hearing about faxmodems, OCR software, tricks, "gotchas", and so forth.
Please email, if possible... I'll summarize if there's sufficient
interest.

advTHANKSance!

-- 
Dave Platt                                             VOICE: (415) 493-8805
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