So, the only thing that stopped AI from learning from all our science and taking over the world was the difficulty of converting PDFs of academic papers to more computer readable formats.
Not anymore.
Mistral OCR
231–240 of 450 posts
Re: Mistral OCR
#232It's shocking how much our industry fails to see past its own nose. Not a single example on that page is a Purchase Order, Invoice etc. Not a single example shown is relevant to industry at scale.
Mistral is Europe based where invoices are more or less sent digitally in like 95% of all the cases anyway. Some are even digital invoices, which will at some point in the eu be mandatory. For orders there are proposals for that, too. And basically invoice data extraction is a different beast.
So an invoice attached to an email as a PDF is sent digitally ... those unfamiliar with PDF will think text and data extraction is trivial then, but this isn't true. You can have a fully digital, non-image PDF that is vector based and has what looks like text, but doesn't have a single piece of extractable text in it. It's all about how the PDF was generated. Tables can be formatted in a million ways, etc.
Your best bet is to always convert it to an image and OCR it to extract structured data.
Re: Mistral OCR
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
May I ask as a layperson, how would you about using this to OCR multiple hundreds of pages? I tried the chat but it pretty much stops after the 2nd page.
Submit the pages via the API.
This worked indeed. Although I had to cut my document into smaller chunks. 900 pages at once ended with a timeout.
Re: Mistral OCR
#234It's shocking how much our industry fails to see past its own nose. Not a single example on that page is a Purchase Order, Invoice etc. Not a single example shown is relevant to industry at scale.
Mistral is Europe based where invoices are more or less sent digitally in like 95% of all the cases anyway. Some are even digital invoices, which will at some point in the eu be mandatory. For orders there are proposals for that, too. And basically invoice data extraction is a different beast.
One use-case is digitising receipts from business related travels for expenses that employees paid for out of their own pocket and which they are submitting pictures to the business for reimbursement.
Bus travels, meals including dinners and snacks, etc. for which the employee has receipts on paper.
Re: Mistral OCR
#235It's shocking how much our industry fails to see past its own nose. Not a single example on that page is a Purchase Order, Invoice etc. Not a single example shown is relevant to industry at scale.
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Re: Mistral OCR
#236It's shocking how much our industry fails to see past its own nose. Not a single example on that page is a Purchase Order, Invoice etc. Not a single example shown is relevant to industry at scale.
Businesses at scale use EDI to handle purchase orders and invoices, no OCR needed.
Thats simply not a factual statement.
Scaled businesses do USE edi, but they still receive hundreds of thousands of PDF documents a month
source: built a saas product that handles pdfs for a specific industry
Re: Mistral OCR
#237Such a shame that PDF doesn’t just, like, include the semantic structure of the document by default. It is brilliant that we standardized on an archival document format that doesn’t include direct access to the document text or structure as a core intrinsic default feature. I say this with great anger as someone who works in accessibility and has had PDF as a thorn in my side for 30 years.
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Re: Mistral OCR
#238But what's the need exactly for OCR when you have multimodal LLMs that can read the same info and directly answer any questions about it ? For a VLLM, my understanding is that OCR corresponds to a sub-field of questions, of the type 'read exactly what's written in this document'.
Getting PDFs into #$@ Confluence apparently. Just had to do this and Mistral saved me a ton of hassle compared to this: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-questions/...
Re: Mistral OCR
#239It's shocking how much our industry fails to see past its own nose. Not a single example on that page is a Purchase Order, Invoice etc. Not a single example shown is relevant to industry at scale.
To be fair: Reading the blog post, the main objective seems to have been to enable information extraction with high confidence for the academic sector (e.g. unlocking all these paper pdfs), and not necessarily to be another receipt scanner.
Re: Mistral OCR
#240[dead]