Amazon Textract uses a machine learning (ML) service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables. Today, many companies manually extract data from scanned documents such as PDFs, Images (PNG | JPEG), Tables, and Forms, or through simple OCR software that requires manual configuration (which often must be updated when the form changes). To overcome these manual and expensive processes, Textract uses ML to read and process any type of document, accurately extracting text, handwriting, tables, and other data with no manual effort. Amazon Textract can extract the data in minutes instead of hours or days.
In addition you can leverage Receipt Analyze feature that can find the vendor name on a receipt even if it’s only indicated within a logo on the page without an explicit label called “vendor”. It can also find and extract item, quantity, and prices that are not labeled with column headers for line items. As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with Amazon Textract for free. The Free Tier lasts for 3 months, and new AWS customers can analyze up to 1,000 pages per month using Text Tasks and up to 100 pages per month using the Form or Table Tasks.
