The version we used, was a pain, required manual intervention. To guide it when it was confused and then to correct the errors. Accuracy was extremely important to us. The tool that we used was commercially available.
Sometimes the source was so rough that the OCR would guess wrong and do a terrible job.
Interesting... the human brain can interpolate based on sentence grammar and conceptually when a software program cannot. A computer cannot deal in concepts and ideas. This is AI and pattern recognition both at the shape matching level and conceptually.
We just ended up giving it to our documentation person who transcribed it and she was good.
Good point.
Human image recognition is so vastly superior to anything a computer can do that we routinely use jumbled up text on a patterned background - or picking out images with cars or boats in - as an infallible test for humanity.