Now FaxDesk reads each incoming fax once, as it arrives, and keeps the words beside it. A search box on the Incoming list takes anything printed on a page - a name, an auth number, a claim number, a payer, a drug - and narrows the list to the faxes that contain it. Under each hit you see the line it was found on and the page; Open jumps straight to that page.
- Reading happens on your own PC with Tesseract, the free open-source OCR engine. No upload, no cloud, nothing leaves the office. Install it once (Windows installer or brew install tesseract on a Mac); FaxDesk finds it.
- New faxes are searchable within a minute of arriving. Faxes already in your inbox are read in the background, newest first, about six a minute.
- Partial words work, capitals do not matter, and several words find faxes that contain all of them.
- The words are kept with the fax and removed with it when your retention days run out. What you search for is never written to the audit log.
Fax-quality scans read well enough for names and numbers; a handwritten note will not be found, and neither will a page that came through as black streaks. When a fax cannot be read, search just skips it and everything else keeps working.
How it works at the desk
- Install Tesseract OCR on the PC that runs FaxDesk (one installer, defaults). Settings > Search shows On.
- On Incoming, type in the search box: a name, a number, a payer. The list narrows as you type; the matching line shows under each fax.
- Press Open on a hit - it opens on the page the words are on. Clear the box and the full list is back.
Free for one desk. One file, no installer, nothing leaves your PC but the fax.
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