Sinhala Image to Text
Free Sinhala OCR — the language most vendors skip, measured at 97.5%.
VisionParse converts Sinhala images to editable UTF-8 text free — one of very few OCR services that supports Sinhala at all, built by a Sri Lankan company.
Most Western OCR products do not offer Sinhala; the big cloud APIs bury it or skip it. We measured ours instead of just listing it: 97.48% character accuracy on a printed paragraph including combining vowel signs and a conjunct form (ව්යාපාරයට). Sinhala documents are why this company exists, and this page carries the number to prove the support is real.
- Free · no account
- JPG · PNG · WEBP · TIFF · BMP · HEIC
- 3 MB · 3 pages
- Deleted within 1h
Drop an image to read it
JPG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, BMP, HEIC — up to 3 MB. Your file is read on our servers in Frankfurt and deleted within the hour.
What this tool does, in numbers.
- ACCURACY
Sinhala printed text read at 97.48% character accuracy in our measurement, scored against exact ground truth.
- SPEED
VisionParse read a Sinhala paragraph in 0.29 seconds on an 8-vCPU server.
- LANGUAGES
The Sinhala model reads the full syllabary — base letters, combining vowel signs (පිලි) and joined conjunct forms — into standards-compliant Unicode.
- LIMIT
Older orthography and low-resolution newsprint score below our published figure: the loops that distinguish similar letters close up when pixels run out.
- ACCESS
The Sinhala image to text tool requires no account, no email address and no payment card.
- RETENTION
VisionParse deletes free-tool Sinhala files one hour after conversion.
Where the 97.48% character accuracy comes from.
Every figure on this page traces to a dated run on hardware we name. Nothing here is a vendor estimate.
Measured 2026-08-03
- Claim
- Sinhala print, including a zero-width-joiner conjunct, read at 97.48% — real support, not a listed language nobody measured.
- Method
- VisionParse standard recognition tier, single-threaded. Full methodology.
- Sample
- A 119-character Sinhala document paragraph rendered with Sinhala (Brahmic syllabary)-correct Noto type through Pango (real text shaping), read through the production pipeline with the sin language model, and scored character-by-character against the exact source.
- Measured
2026-08-03on Contabo Cloud VPS 8 — 8 vCPU AMD EPYC, 24 GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04.4- Limitations
- Modern print in a standard typeface; decorative typefaces and old-orthography books will score lower. A single synthetic document per variant is a small sample and is not a substitute for a corpus. These figures describe format behaviour, not general accuracy. A 500-document corpus run is scheduled and will supersede them.
- Contact
- VisionParse@senithu.lk
What this tool gets wrong
Conjuncts and combining signs read correctly. The test paragraph deliberately included ව්යාපාරයට — a form with a zero-width joiner that breaks naive text pipelines — and it came back intact and correctly encoded. Copy-paste into any Unicode-aware editor works.
Low-resolution newsprint is the hard case. Sinhala letters are distinguished by small loops and openings; below roughly 30 pixels of letter height those features merge. Photograph documents flat and close rather than at arm’s length.
Three steps, no account.
Drop your Sinhala image
A scan, a photo or a screenshot — JPG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, BMP and HEIC are all accepted.
We read it in the right language
This page's converter runs Sinhala recognition (sin) — not English recognition guessing at Sinhala (Brahmic syllabary) shapes.
Take the text
UTF-8 text appears with a confidence score. Copy it or download a .txt; the file is deleted within the hour.
What this tool accepts.
| Property | Free tool |
|---|---|
| Language model | Sinhala (sin), Tesseract 5 traineddata |
| Script | Sinhala (Brahmic syllabary) |
| Measured accuracy | 97.48% character accuracy (2026-08-03) |
| Measured speed | 0.29 s per paragraph |
| Output | Plain text, UTF-8 |
| Maximum file size | 3 MB |
| Rate limit | 5 files per hour, per IP address |
| File retention | Deleted 1 hour after conversion |
| Processing location | Frankfurt, Germany |
When to use the API instead.
This page converts one file now. To convert files from your own software, the same engine runs over HTTP from Starter upward.
# same engine, from your code curl -X POST https://api.visionparse.app/v1/ocr \ -H "x-api-key: $VISIONPARSE_KEY" \ -F "file=@image.jpg" → 202 { "jobId": "c0df8e2c…" }
Use the API when
You convert more than a few files, convert on a schedule, or need results inside another system. Batch, webhooks and bounding boxes are API-only.
Frequently asked
Why do so few OCR tools support Sinhala?
Small market, complex script, no commercial pressure — most vendors never trained a model. We are a Sri Lankan company; Sinhala was a founding requirement, not an afterthought, and we publish a measured figure for it.
Does it handle "yansaya" and other conjunct forms?
Yes — our test paragraph included a ZWJ conjunct and it read correctly with proper Unicode encoding, so it renders right everywhere Unicode Sinhala renders.
Can it read mixed Sinhala and English documents?
Yes. Sri Lankan documents mix scripts constantly, and the recognition handles Latin text and digits appearing inside Sinhala pages.
What about old or degraded book scans?
We measured one: a genuinely degraded Sinhala book page read at 94.5% on this free tool, with errors on similar-loop letter pairs. The same scan read at 99.2% through the AI model our paid extraction uses — so for archival material, the paid tier has a measured, not claimed, advantage.
Is the Sinhala image to text tool free?
Yes — 5 files a day with no account, no email and no card. A free account raises the allowance to 100 pages a month.
Do you keep my Sinhala documents?
Free-tool files are deleted one hour after conversion, and no customer file is ever used to train models.