duddy Posted February 9, 2020 Share Posted February 9, 2020 OCR for LaTeX Equations   Productized Artificial Intelligence 🔌  As input for its OCR pipeline, Mathpix can use either a camera photo (on mobile) or a screenshot (on desktop) Mathpix is a tool to extract LaTeX from PDFs and handwritten notes, available across macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. I’ve used it extensively during my MSc and continue to use it at Plumerai when referencing equations from literature in writeups. Mathpix has saved me a ton of time that I’d otherwise spend tediously rewriting LaTeX math, and in my experience, it always outputs syntactically correct LaTeX source and has never gotten an equation wrong. Mathpix is a great example of productized artificial intelligence because it takes a hard problem—joint optical character recognition (OCR) and presentational markup generation—, solves it well, and then wraps it in a smooth user experience. They monetize using a freemium model for consumers (50 free snips free per month, or unlimited snips for $5 per month) and a paid API for third party developers. Find out more on the company’s website: Mathpix Snip (consumer app) and Mathpix OCR (developer API). Side note: I had some trouble tracking down exactly what machine learning algorithms power Mathpix, so I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole. Their website doesn’t mention any details of how the OCR works, but an old hackernews comment points toward some Harvard NLP research that used a neural encoder-decoder model to achieve similar results, and least one of their employees has the job title Senior Deep Learning R&D Engineer on LinkedIn. So even though their website doesn’t shout it from the rooftops (which is also nice for a change), I think Mathpix definitely qualifies as a “real” AI application. Source   Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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