Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) is an important technology. Amazon now has a wonderful service that assists with OCR.

Amazon Textract automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. These scanned documents can be a litany of documents that are typically scanned in as a PDF.

But Amazon Textract is more than just OCR. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Instead of utilization technology like Amazon Textract, many companies attempt to extract their data through manual data entry. This is time-consuming and tedious. It also requires lots of human labor to make this happen. This human labor an also be expensive.

Amazon Textract overcomes these hurdles by using machine learning to instantly “read” almost any type of document to accurately extract text and data without the need for human labor. With Textract you can quickly automate document workflows, enabling an individual or company to process millions of document pages in hours. 

Companies, individuals or families can utilize this service through Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a subsidiary of Amazon on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.