This plays so well with the theory of AWS taking a slice of all web activity. They are commoditising more and more complex tasks and enabling huge number of engineers to bootstrap their idea with amazing tech from day 1. A huge jump from S3/EC2 to this. Commendable.
Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
11–20 of 74 posts
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#12Is off the shelf open source OCR not reliable for an image of reasonable fidelity, like a smartphone camera picture of a B&W text document? I ask because it feels like I should have an app that lets me scan with my phone, process the text with OCR, then let me plain text search every scanned document I have. The first part only natively made it into iOS Notes a year or two ago, but that whole experience above should…
This is an Evernote feature. Dropbox also launched this feature.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#13Any idea if this can support handwriting even with a reduced confidence? Support for non-English languages?
According to the Textract preview sign up form there is the following features:
- Printed text detection
- Handwritten text detection
- Key-Value detection
- Table detection
- Checkbox detection
- Other optical marks (e.g. barcode, QR code)
There's a decent possibility it has handwriting recognition. Not sure about the non-English languages though.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#14I have a personal flow using tesseract to scan docs into searchable PDFs, but it’s not that accurate. One of the main problems is that some (now most?) of the documents are in German since I live in Germany, but some are in English. There’s a way to choose the language but nothing to auto detect as far as I’m aware. I was hoping for some cloud AI service with superior OCR and simple integration or CLI (push a PDF and…
If you don't absolutely need the integration/CLI, I recommend FineReader (Standard edition). You can specify that the document can contain text from a set of languages (e.g., German and English) and it will auto-detect appropriately. If you need automation (of import, processing, export), this can be done with FineReader Server (formerly known as Recognition Server), but the pricing is quite high for personal use. FineReader Corporate edition has limited automation -- if sufficient for your needs, the pricing might be much more reasonable. I have used the Standard edition and Recognition Server extensively, but have not used the Corporate edition. If you really want a cloud service, you can make your own with their Cloud SDK or use their FineReader Online, but I also have no experience with these.
As for accuracy, the details of your documents and scanning can matter, but, for normal personal usage, it should be very high.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#15Is off the shelf open source OCR not reliable for an image of reasonable fidelity, like a smartphone camera picture of a B&W text document? I ask because it feels like I should have an app that lets me scan with my phone, process the text with OCR, then let me plain text search every scanned document I have. The first part only natively made it into iOS Notes a year or two ago, but that whole experience above should…
This is an Evernote feature. Dropbox also launched this feature.
Evernote is an interesting case.
They store every word that MAY be in the scanned document.
So their OCR engine will find a lot of legitimate words, but it will also find a lot of words that don't sense too.
When putting in a term for searching, it looks at the entire index (both legit words and the garbage) and returns you the documents that match.
I think it's quite clever.
Bear in mind that this feature was many years ago, I have no idea if this is still the case.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#16I have a personal flow using tesseract to scan docs into searchable PDFs, but it’s not that accurate. One of the main problems is that some (now most?) of the documents are in German since I live in Germany, but some are in English. There’s a way to choose the language but nothing to auto detect as far as I’m aware. I was hoping for some cloud AI service with superior OCR and simple integration or CLI (push a PDF and…
If you're running tesseract locally (i.e. not paying per invocation), run it once with EN and count occurrences of the/this/a/any etc, run it again with DE and count occurrences of der/die/das/um/ab/wie, and go from there? Edit: Hell, even average word length is probably going to be a good indicator since German is so agglutinative. Collect some factors like this and I think you'll be able to build a pretty good clas…
Good idea. I would take it one step further. I would use a ML-based language detection tool which should return a list of languages and a confidence score. Whichever language has the highest confidence score wins. The FastText project has a good pre-trained model available.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#17Not sure if this is bad news for the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) sector or an opportunity to offload the "Robotic" part while focusing on business process...
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#18This plays so well with the theory of AWS taking a slice of all web activity. They are commoditising more and more complex tasks and enabling huge number of engineers to bootstrap their idea with amazing tech from day 1. A huge jump from S3/EC2 to this. Commendable.
I sort of agree. But I think the reality is a little closer to Apple's style of innovation. Few of the things that aws offers are things that didn't exist before. For example, data extraction and image recognition APIs have been around for a long while now from several different providers.
AWS is just aggregating it all into one place and giving it a really good final polish.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#19Found some interesting tidbits in their FAQ [0]:
"Q: What type of text can Amazon Textract detect and extract?
A: Amazon Textract can detect Latin-script characters from the standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols."
So, English only. But very worryingly is that they're going to keep your companies' documents:
"Q. Are document and image inputs processed by Amazon Textract stored, and how are they used by AWS?
A: Amazon Textract may store and use document and image inputs processed by the service solely to provide and maintain the service and to improve and develop the quality of Amazon Textract..."
"Q. Can I delete images and documents stored by Amazon Textract?
A: Yes. You can request deletion of document and image inputs associated with your account by contacting AWS Support. Deleting image and document inputs may degrade your Amazon Textract experience."
That said, I'm still baffled on what value-add they're providing? For me, from the name alone, it would generate other documents of common types: .txt (without images), .doc, .html (zip). That is, a large part of extracting text is the ability to reflow the text across page boundaries & columns. However, this product states that:
"All extracted data is returned with bounding box coordinates" [1]
...which is how pdf documents lay things out in the first place...Have I missed something?
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#20Can't use this because my clients/contract don't allow sending of documents to third parties.