Businesses worldwide extract valuable data from tons of documents daily, such as digital, printed, and handwritten documents. This data helps companies to make informed decisions, improve business processes, and enhance customer experience. However, extracting data from so many documents manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Moreover, manual data extraction can produce inaccurate results due to human error. For this reason, thousands of businesses now use an API for OCR to extract data from any document quickly and efficiently. A reliable OCR API free delivers highly accurate results and allows companies to automate their data extraction process.
Read on to learn more about choosing and implementing an OCR API free into your workflow.
What Is OCR Technology?
OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a highly useful technology that enables businesses to convert image files and scanned documents into editable and easily accessible data. It can accurately extract data from digital files, handwritten documents, and printed documents. An efficient OCR tool can even extract text from partially handwritten notes. You can use OCR to extract data from passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, tax receipts, IDs, and more. With the help of OCR, we can even convert PDF files and scanned documents into editable digital files and search for information within documents. As a result, OCR saves time and costs and improves the data extraction process, which makes it an invaluable tool for businesses.
OCR engine works by detecting characters from images and scanned documents. It then breaks the characters into smaller components and detects each component’s features that make up a character or alphabet. Advanced OCR tools today use neural networks for accurate feature detection.
Why Is It Important to Use OCR API Free in Business Workflows?
An OCR API free can help businesses in several ways:
Accurate Results
Manual data extraction and data entry have high chances of inaccurate results due to human errors. Moreover, critical details can be overlooked. However, you can automate your document processing and data extraction process using an OCR API free, and OCR provides highly accurate results without missing any details.
Cost Savings
With OCR APIs, businesses can save valuable time and costs. While manual data extraction is labor-intensive and takes hours, OCR can automatically extract structured data from several documents quickly. Moreover, with OCR, businesses can reduce costs for storing and managing tons of printed documents.
Enhanced Productivity
Using OCR for automated data extraction means employees don’t have to work on tedious tasks. As a result, implementing an OCR API allows employees to focus on more crucial and value-added tasks and improves their productivity.
Quick Access to Information
Free OCR API is an invaluable tool for businesses that have to deal with lots of handwritten documents. With OCR, companies can quickly extract data from handwritten documents and get timely access to the information they need.
What Are The Best OCR Tools in 2023?
Many OCR APIs are available in the market, but not all OCR tools are accurate. Some of the best OCR tools include Filestack, Abbyy FineReader PDF, Adobe Acrobat DC, Readiris, and IBM Datacap. All these tools offer impressive OCR features and make the data extraction process fairly quick and accurate. For instance, with Abbyy FineReader PDF, you can transform scanned files into searchable PDF documents. You can also adjust paragraphs and edit sentences. It also lets users comment on documents and annotate any section in converted PDF files. Similarly, IBM Datacap can efficiently automate the processing, identification, and classification of documents, especially business documents. It offers rules-based detection and content management.
However, Filestack OCR, part of the Filestack processing API, leads the pack with its advanced OCR features, ease of use, and high accuracy. The API can accurately extract data from any scanned or digital document. You can easily integrate it into your existing systems and workflows to automate your data collection process.
Features of the Filestack OCR API
Here are the key features of the Filestack OCR API:
- Filestack OCR API lets you easily digitize handwritten and printed documents. It can efficiently identify and decipher printed and handwritten text characters. Moreover, it uses powerful digital image analysis techniques to extract data from images and printed documents.
- Filestack OCR tool can extract and organize text from receipts, business cards, passports, IDs, driver’s licenses, tax documents, invoices, credit cards, and more. The powerful tool scans character-by-character and converts them into specialized identification codes.
- The API provides detailed results, including even small details about the detected textual data, lines, and words.
- The efficient API is trusted by many businesses worldwide as it reduces errors and streamlines the data extraction and data collection process.
- Extensive documentation consists of several code snippets (examples) and all the details about how the API works.
- The OCR API is known to reduce errors.
What Are The Key Steps to Choosing and Implementing an OCR API Free?
Step 1: Identify Areas for OCR Integration
OCR can be used for different purposes, such as automating data extraction, converting printed and handwritten documents into editable and searchable PDF documents, translating words in a specific document into a specific language, etc. Hence, it’s best to identify areas where OCR can be implemented into your workflows.
Step 2: Choose the Right OCR API Free Tool
While several efficient and reliable OCR APIs and tools are available, choosing the right tool that offers features your business needs is essential. For instance, if you want to extract data from handwritten documents, you should choose a tool that can accurately exact text from such documents. Similarly, if you have large and complex documents with lots of pages, it’s crucial to use an OCR API free that can handle such documents.
Step 3: Prepare Data for Processing
If you have digital documents, you can use them directly for OCR data extraction. However, if you have printed or handwritten documents, you must first scan them. The scanned pages are then converted into scanned images, which are then used as input for the OCR tool.
Step 4: Implementing OCR API Free in Your Workflow
Once you’ve identified the processes that you want to automate with the OCR API free, you can easily implement it into your workflow. You can integrate the API with your system and then use your documents as the input for the API. To use an OCR API, you need an API key.
Step 5: Monitor Results and Improve Processes
Once you have OCR results, it’s essential to monitor whether they are accurate. This can be done by comparing the OCR output with the original document. For example, you can check how many characters were misspelled.
How to Implement the Best OCR API?
In this section, we’ll show you how to implement Filestack OCR API, which is one of the leading OCR tools. Filestack OCR is available as a synchronous operation in the Processing API using the ‘ocr’ task. However, you first need to get your API key. To use the ‘ocr’ task in Processing API, you need to use the security policy and signature.
Here is how you can get the OCR response on your selected image:
https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/security=p:<POLICY>,s:<SIGNATURE>/ocr/<HANDLE>Here is how you can use ocr with an external URL:
https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/<FILESTACK_API_KEY>/security=p:<POLICY>,s:<SIGNATURE>/ocr/<EXTERNAL_URL>You can also use ‘ocr’ in a chain with other tasks, such as doc_detection:
https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/security=p:<POLICY>,s:<SIGNATURE>/doc_detection=coords:false,preprocess:true/ocr/<HANDLE>You can also create a workflow to automate your OCR data extraction. Using the Workflows UI, you can configure your tasks and logic between them the way you want. The OCR task is available under the Intelligence tasks category.
Conclusion
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) helps with automated data extraction from digital and scanned documents. It offers several benefits, such as time-saving, cost reduction, and high accuracy. However, choosing the right tool for your business needs is essential. Some of the best OCR tools include Filestack OCR API, Abbyy FineReader PDF, IBM Datacap, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, and Readiris.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What OCR API Is the Best?
Filestack OCR API, a part of processing API, provides highly accurate results. It can extract text from business cards, driver’s licenses, passports, receipts, IDs, tax documents, invoices, credit cards, and more.
What Are the Benefits of Using an OCR API Free?
Using an OCR API saves valuable time and costs, automates data extraction, improves data accuracy, and enhances employee productivity.
Is OCR Software Easy to Use?
It depends on which OCR tool you’re using. For instance, using Filestack OCR is super quick and easy.
Sign up for Filestack and try its OCR API today!
Sidra is an experienced technical writer with a solid understanding of web development, APIs, AI, IoT, and related technologies. She is always eager to learn new skills and technologies.