How Kannada OCR works
Drop a photo of a Kannada newspaper, a scanned RTC land record, a textbook page or a screenshot, and the text is recognised and saved as Unicode Kannada for Word, Google Docs, WhatsApp or a translator. The output is standard Unicode, not the non-Unicode encoding of older Nudi or Baraha documents, so it works in every app.
Kannada is a close relative of Telugu: rounded letters, most with a small stroke on top, vowel signs (gunitakshara) that change each consonant, and consonant clusters written with the second letter as a small subscript form, an ottakshara, below the line, as in ಕ್ಕ or ಸ್ತ. Tesseract's Kannada model reads whole lines with a neural network trained on printed Kannada, which handles these stacked forms far better than OCR that matches letters one by one.
Ottaksharas and small vowel signs are the details most easily lost, so letters that differ only by them get confused in small print or soft photos. The arkavattu, the r-sign written after a letter, is another frequent miss. Kannada digits (೦ to ೯) are recognised when printed, although most modern documents use 0 to 9.
The Kannada model, about 1.9 MB, downloads from the jsDelivr CDN the first time you press the button and is cached, along with the OCR engine of about 4 MB, so later images start straight away. It is trained on Kannada script, so if the text mixes in English words, tick Also read English words and the English model reads alongside it, a little more slowly. The image itself is read inside this tab and never uploaded. The result is a UTF-8 text file named after the image. For an editable Word document instead, use Image to Word and choose Kannada.
Kannada OCR options explained
| Language | Kannada, already selected. |
|---|---|
| Script | Kannada, written left to right, with subscript consonants (ottaksharas) below the line. |
| Model size | About 1.9 MB, downloaded once and cached. |
| Output | Plain UTF-8 text, one file per image. |
| Layout | Not kept; the words come out in reading order. |
When to use it
Use Kannada OCR to copy text from a scanned land record or government order, to type up a photographed textbook page or notice, to search old newspapers and books, or to paste Kannada from an image into a translator.
Keep the subscript letters sharp: photograph from close, in good light, and check by zooming in that the ottaksharas are clearly separate from the letters above them.
About the OCR engine
Text recognition uses Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine first developed at HP, then for many years at Google, and now maintained by its open-source community. Its current generation reads whole lines of text with a neural network (an LSTM) rather than matching letters one at a time, which is what lets it handle joined scripts such as Arabic and Devanagari. Tesseract.js compiles it to WebAssembly so it runs in this tab. Each language has its own trained model, downloaded from the jsDelivr CDN only when that language is chosen and then cached, so reading English never downloads Hindi, and the other way round. The models used here are the integer versions of Tesseract's most accurate models, which keep nearly all of their accuracy at a fraction of the size. Tesseract is built for printed text: it reads books, letters, forms, signs and screenshots well, handwriting poorly, and it keeps the words of a page in reading order but not its layout.
Kannada OCR troubleshooting
Subscript letters are lost
Use a larger, sharper image; ottaksharas are the first detail to go.
The result is English gibberish
English was selected. Choose Kannada and convert again.
An old Nudi document copies as broken text
Text in older non-Unicode fonts does not copy correctly. Convert the page to an image and read it here.
How to use Kannada OCR, step by step
- Press "Choose images" or drag files onto the box.
- Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
- Press "Extract text". The work happens on your device.
- Save the result with its download button.
Is it safe to do this online?
With most online tools, "online" means your file is uploaded to a company's server, processed there and kept for a while before it is deleted. Here it is not. The page downloads the tool's code to your browser, and your file is read and processed inside the tab on your own device. It is never sent to TapToConvert or anyone else.
You can check this yourself: once the page and its engine have loaded, turn off Wi-Fi and the tool still works. That also means there is no queue, no daily limit and no file size cap set by a server; the only limit is the memory your browser gives a single tab.
Kannada OCR FAQ
Is the output Unicode Kannada?
Yes, standard Unicode that displays in every app.
Can it read handwritten Kannada?
Not reliably; it is trained on printed text.
Does it read Tulu or Kodava?
When they are written in Kannada script, the letters are read, but the model expects Kannada words, so check the result.
Can I get a Word document?
Yes. Use Image to Word and choose Kannada.
Is it free?
Yes. No sign-up, no watermark and no limit on use. TapToConvert is supported by advertising.
Are my files uploaded?
No. Everything happens inside your browser tab, on your own device.