BigOven RecipeScan Vs. Evernote: Fight!

Pretty much the only kind of paper books I still have are cookbooks. I have a ton, and most of them aren?t available in electronic form, plus I really like it when the food-stained pages fall open at favorite recipes. What I have no love for is the stack of hand-written recipes I have. They?re hard to find and easy to lose. If only there were some way to put them on my iPad?

BigOven, the iPhone, iPad and web-based recipe index, will now do the hard work for you. The service is called RecipeScan. You upload a photo of your hand-scrawled recipe (or even a page you have torn from a magazine) and ? in two to five days ? you?ll get it back in digital form. The worker is done by a team of human minions, so you should get back something fairly close to the original. Members get three free scans to try the service out and pro members get 25 credits. More credits can be bought for a dollar each.

To test it out, I put it head-to-head with another word-recognizing app, Evernote. Evernote?s handwriting recognition is done by machines, and I also have a paid account which bumps me up the queue. The recipe I used was one I hastily photographed from my mother?s notebook on a recent visit: Lancashire Hot Pot.

Speed

I dragged the photo into Evernote, synced with the server and set a timer for 30 minutes. When I checked back, the handwriting recognition had been done.

BigOven took just over an hour and a quarter, and I got a notification e-mail to let me know. This is likely to be slower if the service gets popular, hence the two to five day estimate.

Winner: Evernote, but not by much. If my account wasn?t paid, it would probably have been even.

Accuracy

Evernote was, as usual, uncannily accurate. Even with my mother?s handwriting it managed to pick out some hard-to-read words. It even recognaized the word ?top?, which my mother had written without a cross on the ?t?, making it look like ?lop.? Evernote had trouble with word in all caps, but if I was searching for this recipe I would find it right away.

BigOven not only makes the recipe searchable, it also turns it into text and puts that text into the appropriate recipe fields. This ? in theory ? means you can swap between metric and American measures. However, the human translating my mother?s recipe didn?t know that ?LB? means ?pound?, ot that ?PT? meant pint. Score even with Evernote.

The human also failed with some spellings ? ?braun? instead of ?brown?, for example ? and also went awry on the classifications, classing the dish as an appetizer. Anyone who has had my mother?s rib-sticking hot pot recipe will know that it?s a lot more than an appetizer.

Also, the recipe is marked as ?American.? Lancashire isn?t very close to the U.S.

Winner: Evernote, but mostly because you still see your original scan, and human error is reduced.

Conclusion

I?d probably stick with Evernote, unless I was already a big user of BigOven. It?s free, automatic and you can also see the original picture you took of the paper, making mistakes impossible. Also, currently I can find no way to upload scans to BigOven direct from the iPad.

Big Oven?s RecipeScan works fine, but I also feel a little guilty using it, knowing that someone, somewhere is being paid pennies to do data entry on my behalf. And imagine if those poor souls are hungry. Reading about delicious dishes would be torture.

RecipeScan Frequently Asked Questions [BigOven]

Evernote product page [Evernote]

See Also:

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/bigoven-recipescan-vs-evernote-fight/

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