4 ms·

Given how high and continuing the popularity of the "simple" conversion of regular PDF forms/tables -- even for the technically-sophisticated HN audience [0] -

by danso 8y 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=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pdf%20convert&sort=byPopularit... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18199708 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5487530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5487530

just_myles 8y 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 8y 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/ https://projects.propublica.org/free-the-files/
ocrcustomserver 8y 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.

by danso 8y ago

just_myles 8y 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 8y 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/ https://projects.propublica.org/free-the-files/

ocrcustomserver 8y 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.