> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.bowerlabs.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Sharper OCR for scientific text

> Photo-to-text extraction now runs on Gemini 2.5/3 Pro with a scientific-lab prompt, dramatically improving accuracy on lab notebooks, gels, and instrument readouts.

**Shipped 2026-03-21 · AI**

Most OCR is built for receipts and street signs. That's not what you're
photographing at the bench. We've upgraded the photo-extraction pipeline to
read lab content well — handwritten notebook pages, instrument readouts,
gel labels, reagent vials.

## What changed

* **Model upgrade** to Gemini 2.5 Pro (and 3.1 Pro Preview where available)
  — substantially better on scientific vocabulary, units, subscripts, and
  chemical formulae.
* **Lab-specific prompt** — the extraction prompt knows about reagents,
  protocol parameters, units (mM, µmol/L, °C), and common lab notebook
  conventions, so it makes fewer guesses on ambiguous characters.
* **Confidence reporting** — when Bower can't read part of an image clearly,
  Bird flags the specific region and asks you to verify before the values
  are committed to your note.

## Why this matters

OCR that misreads "240 µmol/L" as "240 µmol/I" silently corrupts your data.
The new pipeline is honest about its uncertainty — surfacing low-confidence
regions for human review rather than guessing.

## Related docs

* [Mobile capture](/capture/mobile-capture)
* [Bird, your AI assistant](/ai-and-search/bird-ai-assistant)