How to build a Telegram OCR bot
Blog post from LogRocket
A comprehensive tutorial guides readers through creating a Telegram chatbot capable of performing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images and videos using Node.js. The tutorial leverages multiple Node.js modules, including telegraf for bot development, node-tesseract-ocr for text extraction from images, node-ffmpeg for frame extraction from videos, dotenv for managing environment variables, and Axios for HTTP requests. The tutorial details the creation of bot logic using scenes, specifically imageScene and videoScene, to handle different types of media inputs. It explains the setup of a working directory, installation of necessary libraries, registration of the bot using Telegram’s BotFather, and creation of main.js to manage bot instances. The tutorial proceeds to describe the development of specific JavaScript files for managing image and video interactions with users, downloading and deleting files, and performing OCR. Additionally, it demonstrates running the bot on Telegram, showcasing the bot's ability to extract text from both images and videos, and discusses potential improvements for text extraction accuracy.