If you’re a regular SwyxIt! user, you probably know F11, the global hotkey to dial a number from any application. Select a number, press F11 and SwyxIt! will dial it. This works very well with applications where you have the number in textual form such as Word, Excel, Outlook, Notepad, etc. But what if the phone number you want to dial is not available as text, e.g. in a scanned document or a fax you received with SwyxFax.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to dial numbers in arbitrary images? That’s much easier than I thought. Office 2007 has a component called “Microsoft Office Document Imaging”, which includes an optical character recognition (OCR) module with a documented API. I’ve written a small prototype to demonstrate dialing from images.

You need:

1. SwyxIt! v6.25
   (I do not use any specific SwyxIt! v6.25 function, but that’s the version installed on my system)
2. Microsoft Office 2007
   (I’m not sure if all editions have the OCR functionality. Furthermore, it’s an optional component. The sample program’s setup tells you if it is not installed.
3. The attached sample program

Download the MSI file attached to this blog entry, install it, make sure that SwyxIt! is runnning and start the program. You get this window:

Minimize the window and you’re ready to go. Press Shift-F11, the screen is dimmed and the mouse cursor changes to a cross. Draw a rectangle around a number you want SwyxIt! to dial.

As soon as you release the mouse, the selected screen portion is fed to the Office OCR module and via SwyxIt! API the detected number is dialed. If you have a mouse with some additional buttons you can configure, try assigning OCRDialSample.exe to such a button and specify command-line parameter –d. Now you can just press that mouse button to start selection.

What do you think? Is this useful? Should SwyxIt support it out-of-the-box? Leave a comment with your thoughts.