Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document(aws.amazon.com)

229 points by mcrute 7 years ago | 72 comments

cmroanirgo 7 years ago |

Found some interesting tidbits in their FAQ [0]:

"Q: What type of text can Amazon Textract detect and extract?

A: Amazon Textract can detect Latin-script characters from the standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols."

So, English only. But very worryingly is that they're going to keep your companies' documents:

"Q. Are document and image inputs processed by Amazon Textract stored, and how are they used by AWS?

A: Amazon Textract may store and use document and image inputs processed by the service solely to provide and maintain the service and to improve and develop the quality of Amazon Textract..."

"Q. Can I delete images and documents stored by Amazon Textract?

A: Yes. You can request deletion of document and image inputs associated with your account by contacting AWS Support. Deleting image and document inputs may degrade your Amazon Textract experience."

That said, I'm still baffled on what value-add they're providing? For me, from the name alone, it would generate other documents of common types: .txt (without images), .doc, .html (zip). That is, a large part of extracting text is the ability to reflow the text across page boundaries & columns. However, this product states that:

"All extracted data is returned with bounding box coordinates" [1]

...which is how pdf documents lay things out in the first place...Have I missed something?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/textract/faqs/

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/textract/features/

tills13 7 years ago | |

The point of this service is to train their own OCR models for use in other products like Kindle / their e-book store. There doesn't really need to be a value add - if people use it it's a win for them... if people don't it's not really a big loss.

acqq 7 years ago | | |

But in order to train something you have to have the input of what is actually there, I don’t see how that is provided here.

tracker1 7 years ago | |

Think less about books, and more about automating input from forms filled out by hand. In working with this tech, I can say that none of it is great and it would be very nice to be able to ditch what's available for stuff that would work better.

For my employer's use case, the data storage and privacy implications are a non-starter.

kayhi 7 years ago | | |

Wonder if they will offer a local solution.

ocrcustomserver 7 years ago | |

As tracker1 mentioned, don't think of this as for reflowing text for different devices but as a data capture and documents processing solution.

Example: You are dealing with a lot of PDF documents that contain unstructured information (e.g. a filled form) and you need to extract bits of information (e.g. name, address) and output it in a structured format (e.g. JSON/XLS).

VvR-Ox 7 years ago | |

Keeping documents and analyzing your business is not new and will not keep people from using it in their companies I'm afraid. At least it doesn't stop people from Using Windows and other M$ products.

danso 7 years ago |

Given how high and continuing the popularity of the "simple" conversion of regular PDF forms/tables -- even for the technically-sophisticated HN audience [0] -- if Amazon can deliver on OCR-to-data, that feels like a huge achievement. Not as sexy (or creepy) as Rekognition, perhaps, but almost certainly more day-to-day useful to the many, many professionals who work with documents and legacy data entry systems.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pdf%20convert&sort=byPopularit...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5487530

just_myles 7 years ago | |

Agreed. Anything that can lighten the load of having to write custom scripts to handle pdf-to-data conversions will be helpful.

I do maintain some level of skepticism though. It is ocr :D

danso 7 years ago | | |

Even if AWS goes the cynical route of making Textract be an upsell to MTurk -- e.g. the Textract output is not reliable enough on its own, but structured for easy piping to a MTurk job -- that's got to be useful for the many folks who send entire pages to MTurk when they just need a couple boxes proofread.

As an example of a more scripted/structured job, ProPublica built out a crowdsourcing framework in Rails to extract data from FCC filings. But even that was quite difficult, because every state/TV station has its own kind of form: https://projects.propublica.org/free-the-files/

ocrcustomserver 7 years ago | |

There's Google Cloud Vision and Microsoft Cognitive Services that act as competitors to Amazon Rekognition, but AFAIK there's no offering from a FAANG that competes with AWS Textract.

It looks like it's competing with ABBYY (FlexiCapture) and Kofax.

raghavtoshniwal 7 years ago |

This plays so well with the theory of AWS taking a slice of all web activity. They are commoditising more and more complex tasks and enabling huge number of engineers to bootstrap their idea with amazing tech from day 1. A huge jump from S3/EC2 to this. Commendable.

jjeaff 7 years ago | |

I sort of agree. But I think the reality is a little closer to Apple's style of innovation. Few of the things that aws offers are things that didn't exist before. For example, data extraction and image recognition APIs have been around for a long while now from several different providers.

AWS is just aggregating it all into one place and giving it a really good final polish.

ocrcustomserver 7 years ago | |

I was surprised to see them also announce "Amazon Comprehend Medical" which is NLP for a specific vertical: https://aws.amazon.com/comprehend/medical/

Edmond 7 years ago |

Not sure if this is bad news for the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) sector or an opportunity to offload the "Robotic" part while focusing on business process...

macintux 7 years ago | |

Given the fact that Amazon hangs on to the documents after, I don’t think most companies interested in RPA would feel comfortable with it.

Ftuuky 7 years ago | |

There are many RPA solutions with OCR as part of the automation.

njstraub608 7 years ago | | |

Generally, these are stuffed in there for marketing and aren't very effective when used in actual business scenarios.

Source: I do a lot of post-sales consulting work implementing RPA solutions.

Edmond 7 years ago | | |

Right, except that is often the only heavy lift of their offerings (ie turning your paper receipt into an expense report)...A service like this takes away the ML/AI babbling and what they're left with is clunky business process software offerings.

efields 7 years ago |

Is off the shelf open source OCR not reliable for an image of reasonable fidelity, like a smartphone camera picture of a B&W text document?

I ask because it feels like I should have an app that lets me scan with my phone, process the text with OCR, then let me plain text search every scanned document I have.

The first part only natively made it into iOS Notes a year or two ago, but that whole experience above should be out of the box, IMHO…

Holybeds 7 years ago | |

There's a difference between doing OCR and actually understanding what is what in the document content.

For normal text OCR works well. But automatically understanding what is what is more complex.

njstraub608 7 years ago | | |

This ^^

And actually understanding the context of what you're trying to use OCR on can work backward to determine what the text actually is, i.e. if it's a "Name" field then the probabilities of ambiguous letters may change (in the case of handwriting rec).

viig99 7 years ago | |

No open source ocr doesn't work that great, i work for a telecom company, and we process over millions of documents a month, we built everything in house and now are able to process it at almost 40cents per 1000 documents. It a long process to process huge documents like payslips which require text boundary detection, word identification, spatial clustering and writing parsers (depends on word, segment, and clustering probabilities) which can extract required fields out of the documents.

wahnfrieden 7 years ago | |

This is an Evernote feature. Dropbox also launched this feature.

brad0 7 years ago | | |

Evernote is an interesting case.

They store every word that MAY be in the scanned document.

So their OCR engine will find a lot of legitimate words, but it will also find a lot of words that don't sense too.

When putting in a term for searching, it looks at the entire index (both legit words and the garbage) and returns you the documents that match.

I think it's quite clever.

Bear in mind that this feature was many years ago, I have no idea if this is still the case.

hhanshin 7 years ago |

Found some interesting tidbits in their FAQ [0]: "Q: What type of text can Amazon Textract detect and extract?

A: Amazon Textract can detect Latin-script characters from the standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols."

So, English only. But very worryingly is that they're going to keep your companies' documents:

"Q. Are document and image inputs processed by Amazon Textract stored, and how are they used by AWS?

A: Amazon Textract may store and use document and image inputs processed by the service solely to provide and maintain the service and to improve and develop the quality of Amazon Textract..."

"Q. Can I delete images and documents stored by Amazon Textract?

A: Yes. You can request deletion of document and image inputs associated with your account by contacting AWS Support. Deleting image and document inputs may degrade your Amazon Textract experience."

BasHamer 7 years ago |

If this can get me tables out of pdf's generated by crystal reports it would be a godsend for testing. This has been a nightmare to try and solve, the best option so far has been adobe cloud but they don't offer an API for that. I'm excited to try it out.

mjt58 7 years ago | |

Have you tried e.g. https://tabula.technology, https://pdftables.com, https://pypi.org/project/Camelot/?

counciltime 7 years ago | | |

I have a friend who has also developed a number of applications that use OCR specifically for PDF which uses Tesseract. The Report Miner application does a nice job of locating and extracting PDF tables.

https://www.opait.com/tesseractstudio/

https://www.opait.com/Pdfreportminer/

BasHamer 7 years ago | | |

https://pdftables.com failed the test file, pretty good but inconsistent interpretation across rows, sometimes it split the cell, sometimes it did not. Tabula failed to detect multi-line rows, after manually changing the table it did do better than pdftables.com on splitting cells. Both failed the non-printable whitespace characters that created garbled outputs in the excel. The other one would take some time to rig up.

cdolan 7 years ago | | |

Rather than the Camelot link you provided, I think you meant Excalibur? https://github.com/camelot-dev/excalibur

RandomBookmarks 7 years ago | |

How about https://ocr.space/tablerecognition

It returns table data line by line.

BasHamer 7 years ago | | |

handled the non-printed whitespace but butchered the multi- line table headers, so re-building the headers is rough as it is line by line and you need to know what words go together and you have lost the structure.

ocrcustomserver 7 years ago |

Some videos that were just released:

Announcing Amazon Textract, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHX7q4pMGbo

Introducing Amazon Textract: Now in Preview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hagvdqofRU4

Introducing Amazon Hieroglyph: Now in Preview (AIM363), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnZFK_2oqKk

gingerlime 7 years ago |

I have a personal flow using tesseract to scan docs into searchable PDFs, but it’s not that accurate. One of the main problems is that some (now most?) of the documents are in German since I live in Germany, but some are in English. There’s a way to choose the language but nothing to auto detect as far as I’m aware. I was hoping for some cloud AI service with superior OCR and simple integration or CLI (push a PDF and download one with OCR embedded). Google seems to be too complicated unfortunately... Any tips??

ocrcustomserver 7 years ago |

This is very interesting. I'm curious to see how they will execute on several points:

1. How it will deal with multiple templates that the system hasn't seen before. Especially when there is significant difference between the templates.

2. UI/UX. E.g. how it will trace the extracted data to the original source and how it will show the confidence scores of each entity.

3. Verification process, how will the workflow look like when the confidence score is low and the document has to be checked by human operators.

citilife 7 years ago |

This looks a lot like what I've seen from companies such as InstaBase[1]. Given how hard it is to do well (largely due to poor initial images), I'm curious how Amazon's product offering will work.

I a team I'm working with had a lot of success doing this, curious what method(s) they are using.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instabase

sbarre 7 years ago |

So this is Apache Tika as a Service?

https://tika.apache.org/

bpchaps 7 years ago | |

A little late to the comment party, but I was wondering the same. I'm working on a web scrape workflow that's currently using Tika. I'm very interested in to see how well this does in comparison.

sbarre 7 years ago | | |

I was quite surprised by how powerful and flexible Tika can be, and my use-case was pretty basic: crawling a network drive to index project artifacts like Office docs and media files and pushing them into an Elasticsearch index.

Have you found any major problems or shortcomings in your usage?

amelius 7 years ago |

Can't use this because my clients/contract don't allow sending of documents to third parties.

sbarre 7 years ago | |

Have you looked at Apache Tika?

https://tika.apache.org/

ironfootnz 7 years ago |

Amazon Textract may store and use document and image inputs processed by the service solely to provide and maintain the service and to improve and develop the quality of Amazon Textract..."

I still prefer the Dropbox solution for that, but I'm waiting them transforming into an API.

jgalt212 7 years ago |

I have been following this service from afar, as the founder is quite skilled. Seems a bit pricey, but does similar.

https://www.pdfdata.io/

blacksmith_tb 7 years ago |

I wonder if they have any detection of captchas, or if they'd let people just submit screengrabs containing them as 'documents' to be processed...

foxhound6 7 years ago |

Any idea if this can support handwriting even with a reduced confidence? Support for non-English languages?

brad0 7 years ago | |

According to the Textract preview sign up form there is the following features:

- Printed text detection

- Handwritten text detection

- Key-Value detection

- Table detection

- Checkbox detection

- Other optical marks (e.g. barcode, QR code)

There's a decent possibility it has handwriting recognition. Not sure about the non-English languages though.

ocrcustomserver 7 years ago | | |

The docs page [1] (subject to change) mentions:

Do you support handwriting? – We do not support handwriting extraction.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/textract/latest/dg/how-it-works-...

hbcondo714 7 years ago |

Arg, you have to type in all your information even if you are logged into the AWS console

dvtrn 7 years ago |

The FOIA geek in me is....well...geeking out over this. Slightly.

jijji 7 years ago |

This is genius...

1. make "strings" api 2. hook it to a web server 3. profit!