Comparing OCR tools between AWS, Azure and Google

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of converting scanned or printed documents into digital text that can be searched, analyzed, or processed by other applications. OCR tools can help businesses automate workflows, extract insights, and improve customer experience by transforming unstructured data into structured information.

There are many OCR tools available in the market, but how do you choose the best one for your needs? In this blog post, we will compare the OCR tools offered by three major cloud providers: AWS, Azure and Google. We will look at their features to help you make an informed decision.

Features

All three cloud providers offer OCR tools that can extract text from various types of documents, such as PDFs, images, forms, invoices, receipts, passports, etc. They also support multiple languages and formats, such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc. However, there are some differences in the features and capabilities of each tool.

AWS

AWS provides two main services for OCR: Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend. Amazon Textract is a service that can extract text and data from scanned documents using machine learning. It can also identify the layout and structure of the document, such as tables, key-value pairs, checkboxes, etc. Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that can analyze the extracted text and provide insights such as entities, sentiment, topics, etc.

Some of the features of AWS OCR tools are:

- Ability to extract handwritten text from documents

- Ability to extract data from complex documents such as contracts or tax forms

- Ability to integrate with Amazon Augmented AI for human review of low-confidence results

- Ability to use Amazon Document Understanding Solution for an end-to-end pipeline of document processing

Azure

Azure provides a service called Azure Form Recognizer for OCR. It is a cognitive service that can extract text and data from forms and documents using machine learning. It can also understand the layout and structure of the document, such as tables, fields, values, etc. Azure Form Recognizer has two modes: prebuilt and custom. Prebuilt mode can handle common types of documents such as invoices or receipts. Custom mode can train a model on your own data to handle specific types of documents.

Some of the features of Azure OCR tool are:

- Ability to extract data from semi-structured or unstructured documents

- Ability to train custom models with or without labels

- Ability to use Azure Logic Apps or Power Automate for workflow automation

- Ability to use Azure Cognitive Search for full-text search and semantic ranking

Google

Google provides a service called Google Document AI for OCR. It is a platform that can extract text and data from documents using machine learning. It can also understand the layout and structure of the document, such as tables, fields, values, etc. Google Document AI has two modes: general and specialized. General mode can handle any type of document with basic OCR functionality. Specialized mode can handle specific types of documents such as invoices or receipts with advanced OCR functionality.

Some of the features of Google OCR tool are:

- Ability to extract data from scanned or digital documents

- Ability to use pre-trained models or custom models for specialized documents

- Ability to use Google Cloud Storage or Cloud Firestore for document storage

- Ability to use Google Data Studio or BigQuery for data visualization and analysis