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Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#21

Post by tills13 »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #19

Found 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: A…

The point of this service is to train their own OCR models for use in other products like Kindle / their e-book store. There doesn't really need to be a value add - if people use it it's a win for them... if people don't it's not really a big loss.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#22

Post by BasHamer »

If this can get me tables out of pdf's generated by crystal reports it would be a godsend for testing. This has been a nightmare to try and solve, the best option so far has been adobe cloud but they don't offer an API for that. I'm excited to try it out.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#23

Post by Ftuuky »

Edmond wrote: post #17

Not 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...

There are many RPA solutions with OCR as part of the automation.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#24

Post by mjt58 »

BasHamer wrote: post #22

If this can get me tables out of pdf's generated by crystal reports it would be a godsend for testing. This has been a nightmare to try and solve, the best option so far has been adobe cloud but they don't offer an API for that. I'm excited to try it out.

Have you tried e.g. https://tabula.technology, https://pdftables.com, https://pypi.org/project/Camelot/?

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#25

Post by macintux »

Edmond wrote: post #17

Not 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...

Given the fact that Amazon hangs on to the documents after, I don’t think most companies interested in RPA would feel comfortable with it.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#26

Post by Edmond »

Ftuuky wrote: post #23
Edmond wrote: post #17

Not 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...

There are many RPA solutions with OCR as part of the automation.

Right, except that is often the only heavy lift of their offerings (ie turning your paper receipt into an expense report)...A service like this takes away the ML/AI babbling and what they're left with is clunky business process software offerings.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#27

Post by RandomBookmarks »

gingerlime wrote: post #9

I 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…

You can try the free ocr api at https://ocr.space/ocrapi

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#28

Post by BasHamer »

mjt58 wrote: post #24
BasHamer wrote: post #22

If this can get me tables out of pdf's generated by crystal reports it would be a godsend for testing. This has been a nightmare to try and solve, the best option so far has been adobe cloud but they don't offer an API for that. I'm excited to try it out.

Have you tried e.g. https://tabula.technology , https://pdftables.com , https://pypi.org/project/Camelot/ ?

https://pdftables.com failed the test file, pretty good but inconsistent interpretation across rows, sometimes it split the cell, sometimes it did not. Tabula failed to detect multi-line rows, after manually changing the table it did do better than pdftables.com on splitting cells. Both failed the non-printable whitespace characters that created garbled outputs in the excel. The other one would take some time to rig up.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#29

Post by RandomBookmarks »

BasHamer wrote: post #22

If this can get me tables out of pdf's generated by crystal reports it would be a godsend for testing. This has been a nightmare to try and solve, the best option so far has been adobe cloud but they don't offer an API for that. I'm excited to try it out.

How about https://ocr.space/tablerecognition

It returns table data line by line.

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