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Mistral OCR

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR

#271

Post by kiratp »

mentalgear wrote: post #239
kiratp wrote: post #166

It'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.

It hilarious that the academic sector 1. publishes as PDF 2. spends all this energy on how to extract that info back from PDF 3. publishes that research as PDF as well.

Receipt scanning is a multiple orders of magnitude more valuable business. Mistral at this point is looking for a commercial niche (like how Claude is aiming at software development)

Re: Mistral OCR

#272

Post by dotnetkow »

Congrats to the Mistral team for launching! A general-purpose OCR model is useful, of course. However, more purpose-built solutions are a must to convert business documents reliably. AI models pre-trained on specific document types perform better and are more accurate. Coming soon from the ABBYY team, we're shipping a new OCR API designed to be consistent, reliable, and hallucination-free. Check it out if you're looking for best-in-class DX: https://digital.abbyy.com/code-extract-automate-your-new-mus...

Re: Mistral OCR

#273

Post by riffic »

It'd be great if this could be tested against genealogical documents written in cursive like oh most of the documents on microfilm stored by the LDS on familysearch, or eastern european archival projects etc.

Re: Mistral OCR

#274

Post by thadt »

lokl wrote: post #126

Tried with a few historical handwritten German documents, accuracy was abysmal.

Also working with historical handwritten German documents. So far Gemini seems to be the least wrong of the ones I've tried - any recommendations?

Re: Mistral OCR

#275

Post by dotnetkow »

kiratp wrote: post #166

It'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.

Agreed, though in this case, they are going for general-purpose OCR. That's fine in some cases, but purpose-built models trained on receipts, invoices, tax documents, etc., definitely perform better. We've got a similar API solution coming out soon (https://digital.abbyy.com/code-extract-automate-your-new-mus...) that should work better for businesses automating their docs at scale.

Re: Mistral OCR

#276

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

techwizrd wrote: post #223
kbyatnal wrote: post #140

We're approaching the point where OCR becomes "solved" — very exciting! Any legacy vendors providing pure OCR are going to get steamrolled by these VLMs. However IMO, there's still a large gap for businesses in going from raw OCR outputs —> document processing deployed in prod for mission-critical use cases. LLMs and VLMs aren't magic, and anyone who goes in expecting 100% automation is in for a surprise. You still n…

The challenge I have is how to get bounding boxes for the OCR, for things like redaction/de-identification.

AWS Textract works pretty well for this and is much cheaper than running LLMs.

Re: Mistral OCR

#277

Post by dontlikeyoueith »

kbyatnal wrote: post #248
techwizrd wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge I have is how to get bounding boxes for the OCR, for things like redaction/de-identification.

yeah that's a fun challenge — what we've seen work well is a system that forces the LLM to generate citations for all extracted data, map that back to the original OCR content, and then generate bounding boxes that way. Tons of edge cases for sure that we've built a suite of heuristics for over time, but overall works really well.

Why would you do this and not use Textract?

Re: Mistral OCR

#278

Post by einpoklum »

kbyatnal wrote: post #140

We're approaching the point where OCR becomes "solved" — very exciting! Any legacy vendors providing pure OCR are going to get steamrolled by these VLMs. However IMO, there's still a large gap for businesses in going from raw OCR outputs —> document processing deployed in prod for mission-critical use cases. LLMs and VLMs aren't magic, and anyone who goes in expecting 100% automation is in for a surprise. You still n…

An LLM with billions of parameters for extracting text from a PDF (which isn't even a rasterized image) really does not "solve OCR".

Re: Mistral OCR

#279

Post by pavl »

renewiltord wrote: post #72
opwieurposiu wrote: post #25

Related, does anyone know of an app that can read gauges from an image and log the number to influx? I have a solar power meter in my crawlspace, it is inconvenient to go down there. I want to point an old phone at it and log it so I can check it easily. The gauge is digital and looks like this: https://www.pvh2o.com/solarShed/firstPower.jpg

4o transcribes it perfectly. You can usually root an old Android and write this app in ~2h with LLMs if unfamiliar. The hard part will be maintaining camera lens cleanliness and alignment etc. The time cost is so low that you should give it a gander. You'll be surprised how fast you can do it. If you just take screenshots every minute it should suffice.

What software-tools do you usw to Programm the APP?
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