Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has been one of the biggest contributors to Tesseract – has that changed? My understanding – which could be years out of date – was that Google Books used Tesseract but that most of their effort had gone into either advanced image preprocessing or large-scale training.
Yes you're right - they were one of the biggest contributors until a 12-18 months ago (roughly) Now it's deep learning, it's at the point now where there's no point in spending ages manually 'feature engineering', just throw some GPU and soon to be TPU processing power at it
Thanks for the update – has any of that been described in public?