Ask HN: I made a cool OCR based desktop app. Possible to commercialize?

[bhavin]

Dear HN,

I recently worked in my spare time to develop something for the fun of it – A desktop software that can monitor the current activity on a given machine for all the web browsers, including incognito modes.

Basically, the software continuously runs silently in the background, uses screencap, image processing and OCR to resolve what is being accessed, hence it can work on all browsers (and potentially on anything else). The CPU usage is quite negligible due to series of optimizations. It currently works for Linux, I am working on a windows version.

I am not sure if there is a commercial potential to it, and if so, how do I go about realizing it? Can you think of anything in your field where something like this could be useful?

Any help would be much much appreciated. Thank you! :)

[jetti]

If it only handles web browsers currently then I think it will be a hard sell. The use I see of this would be in settings that companies don't trust their employees (call center monitoring comes to mind). That being said, they would most likely be tracking HTTP traffic already so they would be able to tell what sites the employees were visiting. If you could parse out other applications I could see it being a hit.

[bhavin]

Thanks! I can parse any applications really since it reads the data from the display buffer. Web browsers was just an example, it is application agnostic at the core.

> If you could parse out other applications I could see it being a hit.

Could you elaborate?

[uptown]

Something like Prey comes to mind:

https://www.preyproject.com/

[davelnewton]

That seems a little different.

[toexitthedonut]

Could be useful for a headless computer system, to relay the information to someone working on it via terminal.