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Amazon Textract

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description Amazon Textract Overview

Amazon Textract extracts text and document structure from scanned pages and digital documents through an AWS cloud service. Optical character recognition, or OCR, turns visible text into machine-readable information. Textract also identifies form fields and tables, allowing software to receive relationships such as a label paired with a value rather than only a block of text. Businesses and developers can use its APIs to build document-processing workflows for large collections of forms or PDFs.

Preserving table cells and field relationships is especially useful when information must enter another system for review or further processing. Its distinction from basic OCR lies in this structured extraction. Results still need validation appropriate to the document and task, especially when the source image is unclear or the data has practical consequences.

help Amazon Textract FAQ

Can Amazon Textract pull tables and form fields from PDFs, or only raw OCR text?

Amazon Textract can do both. Its Detect Document Text API extracts printed text and handwriting, while Analyze Document handles features such as Forms, Tables, Queries, and Signatures.

When would I use Amazon Textract instead of Tesseract OCR?

Textract is useful when you need structured outputs like key-value pairs, invoice fields, or table cells from scanned PDFs. Tesseract can read text, but Textract is built as an AWS document-processing service rather than only an OCR engine.

Does Amazon Textract work with invoices and ID documents?

Yes. AWS has separate Analyze Expense and Analyze ID APIs for receipts, invoices, passports, driver's licenses, and similar documents. It also has Analyze Lending for mortgage document packages.

How is Amazon Textract priced for small tests?

AWS offers a limited free tier for new customers for the first 3 months, with page limits depending on the API. Outside the free tier, pricing is per page, and AWS lists examples such as Detect Document Text in US West at $0.0015 per page for the first million pages.

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