Extracting text from PDF files can be challenging, especially when dealing with scanned or handwritten documents or files with complex layouts. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology has been a go-to solution for organizations looking to streamline this process, as it can convert text from scanned documents, images, and PDFs into machine-readable and editable text. Many OCR tools, however, struggle with accuracy and lack flexibility, leaving businesses searching for more robust solutions.
This is where Instabase Converse stands out. It combines OCR with generative AI and large language models to provide more accurate and customizable text extraction from PDFs. This powerful tool can intelligently parse through documents, accurately identifying and extracting the relevant information you need.
How OCR Works to Extract Text From PDFs
All OCR tools generally work the same under the hood. If you have a paper document, you’ll need to scan it to convert it to a digital file first. The file is then uploaded to the OCR tool, which analyzes the pixels of the document or image and maps character shapes to their corresponding letters or numbers. The tool then returns the extracted text, which you can copy and paste or export into the necessary format or program.
Limitations of OCR
While traditional OCR tools have been useful for digitizing text from scanned documents and PDFs, they come with several inherent limitations. Accuracy issues, lack of contextual awareness, limited flexibility, and security concerns often undermine their effectiveness and usefulness in a business context, especially when dealing with complex documents or large volumes of information.
- Accuracy issues: OCR can produce errors and inaccuracies when dealing with low-quality scans, complex layouts, handwritten text, or stylized fonts, leading to missing or incorrect text extraction.
- Lack of contextual awareness: OCR tools operate solely on pattern recognition and cannot understand the context or structure of a document, making it difficult to extract specific information or data fields accurately.
- Limited flexibility: OCR solutions extract all the text from uploaded pages without preserving the layout, which means users have no control over the data they want to extract and how it’s formatted. After the data is extracted, users still need to remove what’s unnecessary and potentially fix formatting issues, which can be time-consuming and inefficient, especially if they’re dealing with large volumes of documents.
- Lack of security and compliance: There are many OCR tools available and several are free, but they may not have adequate security measures in place and are more suitable for personal use. Businesses need more secure and compliant solutions than what these free tools typically provide, so they’ll need to more diligently search for an OCR solution that meets their requirements.
To overcome these challenges and unlock the true potential of automated data extraction from PDFs, more advanced solutions that combine OCR with natural language processing and generative AI are required.
Instabase Converse: A More Powerful, Accurate Solution for PDF Data Extraction
Instabase Converse is a generative AI application that allows users to interact with documents using natural language. It combines AI with OCR to extract characters more accurately by understanding the context of the document contents. When it can’t recognize characters with a high degree of accuracy, it’s able to use AI to fill them in intelligently.
Converse also gives users more control over data extraction. Users are able to extract select data, such as specific paragraphs or a table, and format the data as lists, tables, and JSON. It’s as simple as prompting Converse to “extract all instances of [product name]” or “extract the contact information for vendors and format it as a table,” for example. These prompts leverage generative AI’s understanding of document structure and context, allowing for precise and targeted information extraction.
Unlike tools that use OCR only, AI learns from input data and user feedback, continually improving its accuracy and understanding of prompts over time. Converse uses proprietary and third-party models so that users are always able to take advantage of the latest advancements in AI and get superior results.
How to OCR PDF Files With Instabase Converse
It’s incredibly easy to use Converse to extract relevant information from your PDF files. Whether you’re working with financial reports, legal contracts, or any other type of PDF document, just follow these simple steps.
- Go to aihub.instabase.com and open the Converse app. Create a free account or log in to your existing Instabase account.
- Upload your PDF or folder of PDFs.
- Using the text box in the bottom-right corner, ask Converse to extract the information you need from your PDF file. You can extract all of the text in the document or specific parts (note: when extracting all text from a document there may be page limitations – currently 3-4). In this example, we uploaded a white paper from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and asked Converse to “Extract guidelines for centralized network security.”
- You should now see the extracted data. Hover your mouse over the output to bring up two options: copy the text by clicking the overlapping squares icon or export the text as a .txt file by clicking the arrow.
- Need to extract more information from the PDF you’re working with? No problem, you can follow up with as many extraction prompts as needed.
Use Instabase Converse to OCR PDFs for Free
Unlock the information buried in your PDF documents with more secure, powerful, and accurate data extraction.
