There was a time when this seemed like a bad idea, but doesnt seem like a bad idea.
I guess u can use Tesseract OCR Tool, an open source alternative by Google. How to integrate that in Android is simple via Tesseract Android Tools
A good guide on how to do it is also well documented at http://rmtheis.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/using-tesseract-tools-for-android-to-create-a-basic-ocr-app/
Let us also know how this goes for you.
