OCR for Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil and more
Indian documents are some of the hardest for OCR software: there are a dozen major scripts, many with joined letters and vowel signs that wrap around consonants, and official papers often mix a regional language with English on the same page.
Docuflat supports OCR for all major Indian languages, and you can choose up to three languages at once for bilingual documents.
Supported Indian languages
| Language | Script | Language page |
|---|---|---|
| Hindi | Devanagari | Hindi OCR |
| Marathi | Devanagari | Marathi OCR |
| Sanskrit | Devanagari | Sanskrit OCR |
| Nepali | Devanagari | Nepali OCR |
| Bengali | Bengali | Bengali OCR |
| Assamese | Bengali-Assamese | Assamese OCR |
| Gujarati | Gujarati | Gujarati OCR |
| Punjabi | Gurmukhi | Punjabi OCR |
| Odia | Odia | Odia OCR |
| Tamil | Tamil | Tamil OCR |
| Telugu | Telugu | Telugu OCR |
| Kannada | Kannada | Kannada OCR |
| Malayalam | Malayalam | Malayalam OCR |
| Urdu | Perso-Arabic | Urdu OCR |
Each language page opens the converter with that language already selected, along with tips specific to its script.
The output is Unicode
Some older Indian-language software produced text in legacy fonts such as Kruti Dev, where the letters only display correctly in that exact font. OCR output from Docuflat is standard Unicode, so it works in Word, Google Docs, WhatsApp, email and every AI assistant.
Bilingual documents
Court orders, land records, government notices and bank papers often mix a regional language with English. For these, select both languages. On the language pages, the regional language and English are already selected together.
If a page is entirely in one language, remove the other one: OCR is slightly more accurate when it isn't considering two alphabets.
Choose the right language, even when scripts look alike
Several languages share a script but use different letters or vocabulary:
- Marathi vs Hindi: both Devanagari, but Marathi has letters like ळ. Choose Marathi for Marathi text.
- Assamese vs Bengali: the same script, but Assamese uses ৰ and ৱ. Choose Assamese for Assamese text.
- Nepali and Sanskrit also have their own models.
- Punjabi here means Gurmukhi script. Punjabi in Shahmukhi script is closer to Urdu.
Realistic expectations
Clean, printed text in Indian languages converts well. Accuracy drops more quickly than with English when the scan is poor, because vowel signs, dots and joined letters are small. For best results:
- Scan at 300–400 dpi
- Use the original, not a photocopy
- Proofread names, numbers and amounts
See 10 ways to get more accurate OCR for the full checklist.
Using the text with AI assistants
Once converted, you can paste the text into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask for a translation, a summary, or answers to specific questions. Text in Indian scripts uses more tokens than English for the same content, so it's especially worth sending only the pages you need. See how to use fewer tokens with documents.