Peter's list of What''s New in KBM 11.0 mentions OS 10.15+
Added Apple Text Recognition to OCR options (macOS 10.15+).
Given this, I tried the "Speed Test for OCR" macro on my Catalina system.
It goes nowhere. My guess is that after it opens the General Preferences pane, the action:
will run forever because there is no "About" menu item, ever.
Any suggesions?
If you just disable the first 9 actions from my macro, (from the Alert action to the second Execute Shell Script action) I believe it will work. You will just have to enter the specs for your system manually.
As you can guess, it's very hard for me to make a macro run on a different macOS version when Apple keeps changing the System Preferences app.
I could probably add one more action to this macro to take this issue into account.
Late to the party but I wanted to contribute...
16-inch, 2019 (2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 wth 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 memory) ;macOS Sonoma;Version 14.1.1
New Apple OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 2.28467
Old KM OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 4.627749
New OCR Performance Level: 203%
200% isn't as much as others report for their Mx machines, but also keep in mind that (assuming the same Apple OCR code is running on Intel as on Mx) the number of OCR errors (misreading some text) will drop by over 90% and the number of OCR misses (failing to even spot a word) will also be much smaller. So it's still a Win-Win-Win.
Apple M2 Max;64 GB;macOS Ventura;Version 13.5;27-inch (3840 × 2160);27-inch (2560 × 1440)
New Apple OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 2.715712
Old KM OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 16.030403
New OCR Performance Level: 590%
I've just started using OCR in macros and came across this post, so I thought I'd share my results, late as they may be
Display resolution is set to one above "normal" i.e, 1496 x 967
I am using KM version 11.0.3, I don't know if it has an OCR engine different from 10
Running the macro from the macro view of KM Editor gave this:
16-inch, 2021;Apple M1 Max;64 GB;macOS Sonoma;Version 14.5
New Apple OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 0.855981
Old KM OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 4.218324
New OCR Performance Level: 493%
So then I switched to a Notes window that was crammed full of text... and reran the macro
16-inch, 2021;Apple M1 Max;64 GB;macOS Sonoma;Version 14.5
New Apple OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 1.26755
Old KM OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 15.920337
New OCR Performance Level: 1256%
As a final test I used my own macro (which OCR's a full window of text, like a directory page) and got
KM 15.142962 seconds
Apple 2.584986 seconds
Speed increase 5.8580441055
And one extra benefit.... the text in my macro begins with an [optional] icon and then an emoji... old OCR would translate to random characters... whereas Apple text strips them away... which for me is a plus, though maybe not in other circumstances.
So Airy thanks for alerting me to this substantial speed improvement!
Currently using a (rental) MacBook Air M1 from 2020:
Apple M1;8 GB;macOS Sonoma;Version 14.5;13,3-inch (2560 × 1600)
New Apple OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 0.527747
Old KM OCR speed to read screen, in seconds: 2.742235
New OCR Performance Level: 520%
The Old KM OCR seems to be slower than the 2019 Intel Mac, but the new Apple OCR is faster.
You are welcome. It's not just a 500% speed improvement, my limited tests also show a 2000% accuracy improvement (i.e., reduced errors on difficult text.)