This started out as a weekend hack with gpt-4-mini, using the very basic strategy of "just ask the ai to ocr the document".
But this turned out to be better performing than our current implementation of Unstructured/Textract. At pretty much the same cost.
I've tested almost every variant of document OCR over the past year, especially trying things like table / chart extraction. I've found the rules based extraction has always been lacking. Documents are meant to be a visual representation after all. With weird layouts, tables, charts, etc. Using a vision model just make sense!
In general, I'd categorize this solution as slow, expensive, and non deterministic. But 6 months ago it was impossible. And 6 months from now it'll be fast, cheap, and probably more reliable!
But this turned out to be better performing than our current implementation of Unstructured/Textract. At pretty much the same cost.
I've tested almost every variant of document OCR over the past year, especially trying things like table / chart extraction. I've found the rules based extraction has always been lacking. Documents are meant to be a visual representation after all. With weird layouts, tables, charts, etc. Using a vision model just make sense!
In general, I'd categorize this solution as slow, expensive, and non deterministic. But 6 months ago it was impossible. And 6 months from now it'll be fast, cheap, and probably more reliable!