How OCR Works
Understand how yomeru.ai extracts Japanese text from manga and novels in three simple steps.
When you upload a manga page or novel scan, our AI turns it into interactive, clickable text in three steps. The whole process typically takes 10-30 seconds per page.
The Three-Step Process
Detect text regions
Our AI scans the image and identifies where text appears -- speech bubbles and narration boxes in manga, or paragraph blocks in novels. Each region is mapped to its exact position on the page so the text stays connected to where it appears visually.
Our AI identifies speech bubbles, narration boxes, and text regions on the page
Extract the Japanese text
A specialized AI model reads the Japanese characters from each detected region. It handles kanji, hiragana, katakana, and even furigana (the small reading guides above kanji). The model is trained specifically for Japanese text, so it performs far better than general-purpose OCR on manga and novel content.
Analyze every word
Each extracted word is broken down into its reading, dictionary meaning, and part of speech. This is what makes every word clickable in the reader -- you get instant lookups without any extra work.
The end result: every word is clickable with instant readings, meanings, and grammar tags
Accuracy
On clean, well-scanned pages, our system achieves 95%+ accuracy. It handles vertical text, horizontal text, and mixed layouts reliably.
Results can vary with low-resolution images, heavily stylized or hand-drawn fonts, extreme compression artifacts, or text placed over complex artwork. If the first pass misses something, you can reprocess the page for free (one free reprocess per image).
Best results come from good scans
High-resolution images (300+ DPI) with strong contrast between text and background consistently produce the most accurate results.
Language Support
yomeru.ai is built for Japanese. It reads kanji, hiragana, and katakana, and also picks up English text that commonly appears in Japanese media (brand names, loanword labels, and so on).