Consider a situation where you have a letter to send from your iPhone. You don’t want to type it all. But you have a letter already typed out in the form of a physical document. Is it possible to just take a picture of it and send across the letter in the desired text format from your handset? Yes, if you have the OCRKit application from the Apple store installed in your iPhone.

OCRKit iPhone App is designed to perform all image-processing, including optical character recognition (OCR) directly on your iPhone. The app’s publishers have informed that “no image data is transferred to servers over the air, and your data plan is saved and OCRKit just works while abroad”.

How does OCRKit work? By taking a picture of a document, letter, contract, poster, note or business card, the application recognises the text and shows it on the screen. The displayed text is ready for processing, which means you can edit the same, copy and paste it to another app and even exchange it with friends and colleagues. The program is particularly suited for transforming graphical information into a textual form on your iPhone.

Now, here are the essential pre-requisites for the software to run effectively. The OCR requires a sharp image with macro focus and it works best with the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. The company noted that the 5 mega-pixel camera of the iPhone 4 and OCRKit can potentially replace an entry-level portable scanner for working with paper documents abroad. So instead of buying a portable scanner you can get OCRKit App for your iPhone. Priced at $4.99, OCRKit 1.0 comes with support for English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish languages.

Download OCRKit [iTunes Link]