Telugu OCR services
Scanned Telugu books, registers, court files and government records converted into accurate, searchable XML, EPUB or plain text — with a measured accuracy report for every batch.
Used in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — around 8 crore speakers.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Telugu OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Telugu — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
Vowel signs wrap the consonant
Gunintalu attach above, below and to the right of the base letter. What looks like one character to a reader is several Unicode code points, and OCR that treats it as one glyph produces unusable text.
Consonants stack vertically
Ottulu are written beneath the base consonant. A three-letter cluster can occupy two vertical levels, which breaks line segmentation built for Latin script.
Similar circular forms
Many Telugu letters share round strokes that differ by a small hook or opening. On a twenty-year-old photocopy those differences are often two or three pixels.
Mixed English in the same line
Government forms carry English numerals, EPIC IDs and abbreviations inside Telugu text. The model has to switch scripts mid-line without losing either.
Telugu documents we handle
- Electoral rolls and voter lists
- Land records — pahani, adangal, 1-B
- Court judgments and case files
- Government orders and gazettes
- Telugu literature and periodicals
- Temple and endowment records
Typically for State archives, district courts, revenue departments, universities and Telugu publishers.
How a Telugu batch runs
- 1Ingest
Bulk PDF intake from any source — scans, photos, government portals. Page splitting, de-skew, de-noise.
- 2OCR in the right script
Models for Devanagari, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Odia, Urdu and Latin scripts, tuned on Indian government and publishing layouts: tables, multi-column, mixed scripts.
- 3Structure to XML
Fields, tables and hierarchy mapped to your schema — JATS, TEI, DocBook, ONIX, or a custom XSD. Validated on every file.
- 4Quality checks
Automated confidence scoring plus human review of low-confidence pages. You get an accuracy report, not a promise.
- 5Deliver & search
XML/EPUB/JSON/CSV delivery, or a ready-made search interface like the one we built for 2002 voter rolls.
Telugu OCR questions
- How accurate is Telugu OCR?
- It depends far more on scan quality than on the language. On clean modern print we reach high accuracy; on twenty-year-old photocopies the honest answer is that some pages need human review. We run a free 50-page sample of your own documents first and send you the measured accuracy before you commit to anything.
- Can you read handwritten Telugu?
- Handwriting is a separate and harder problem than print, and results vary with the hand. We assess it on your sample and tell you plainly whether it is viable, rather than promising and disappointing you later.
- What formats do I get back?
- Validated XML in your schema, EPUB 3, JSON, CSV or plain Unicode text — plus an accuracy report per batch. You own all output.
- Do you keep the table and page structure?
- Yes. For records like registers and land documents the structure matters as much as the text, so we map fields, rows and columns into your schema rather than dumping a wall of characters.
- Is my Telugu data sent outside India?
- No. Processing runs on our own Python pipeline on servers in India, and we do not upload your documents to third-party AI services without your written agreement.
Send 50 Telugu pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.