Amazon Textract Service Intended For Transcribing Data Is Now Live

Amazon has unveiled a new service named Textract which enables its Web Service customers to accurately harvest text from documents. The word Textract is a combination of ‘Text’ and ‘Extract’, and it does exactly what it says. The software performs the same task as a standard OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reader, but where the OCR scanner falls short, Textract accomplishes the task effortlessly. 

Amazon’s software is designed to identify various document formats and analyze its contents to process them in the desired manner. For instance, if the concerned document is a table, Textract will reproduce data in a structured form that is closest to the original data arrangement. Forms, charts and receipts are scanned and reproduced in a similar manner. And the whole process can be completed without human intervention, rendering Textract as an independent software. 

The stumbling block with basic OCRs is their inability to process mixed data or data which is arranged in an non standard format. For the same reason, organizations utilize manual labour for data entry, which defies the purpose of an automated OCR. On the other hand, Amazon claims that its new service is capable of processing millions of pages in a short duration of time. Noteworthy, unlike several other similar services, machine learning experience is not necessary to use Textract states Amazon.

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Lastly, the Textract can identify organization-specific data such as security numbers and IDs and copy it into spreadsheets which are easily editable. Bigger chunks of data are loaded into databases which are then accessible via smart searches inside the Web Service. The Textract has been released in select parts of the United States (including Ohio, North Virginia, Oregon) and Ireland as of now.