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Is Amazon setting a new Capture Paradigm? Amazon Textract’s text extraction API enables processing documents for $1.50 per 1,000 pages.

Is Amazon setting a new Capture Paradigm? Amazon Textract’s text extraction API enables processing documents for $1.50 per 1,000 pages.

Is this a game-changer for Capture and ECM?

Amazon Textract announced a service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Many companies today extract data from documents and forms through manual data entry that’s slow and expensive or through simple optical character recognition (OCR) software that is difficult to customize. Rules and workflows for each document and form often need to be hard-coded and updated with each change to the form or when dealing with multiple forms. If the form deviates from the rules, the output is often scrambled and unusable.

Amazon Textract overcomes these challenges by using machine learning to instantly “read” virtually any type of document to accurately extract text and data without the need for any manual effort or custom code. With Textract you can quickly automate document workflows, enabling you to process millions of document pages in hours. Once the information is captured, you can take action on it within your business applications to initiate next steps for a loan application or medical claims processing. Additionally, you can create smart search indexes, build automated approval workflows, and better maintain compliance with document archival rules by flagging data that may require redaction.

Amazon Textract makes it easy to quickly and accurately extract data from documents and forms. Amazon Textract automatically detects a document’s layout and the key elements on the page, understands the data relationships in any embedded forms or tables, and extracts everything with its context intact. This means you can instantly use the extracted data in an application or store it in a database without a lot of complicated code in between.

Amazon Textract’s pre-trained machine learning models eliminate the need to write code for data extraction, because they have already been trained on tens of millions of documents from virtually every industry, including invoices, receipts, contracts, tax documents, sales orders, enrollment forms, benefit applications, insurance claims, policy documents and many more. You no longer need to maintain code for every document or form you might receive or worry about how page layouts change over time.

Amazon Textract’s text extraction API enables you to process documents for $1.50 per 1,000 pages. Whether you process a few hundred documents a year or millions, Amazon Textract provides OCR and structured data extraction (forms and tables) at very low cost, and you only pay for what you use. There are no upfront commitments or long-term contracts.

What do you think?