Cohere has introduced Structured Outputs, a feature designed to improve the reliability of output from its Command R series models by ensuring adherence to user-defined response formats, starting with JSON. This capability allows developers to generate consistent and reliable data outputs suitable for programmatic use and function calls, enhancing data extraction, query formulation, and user interface display. The feature utilizes a finite state machine (FSM) to maintain adherence to prescribed formats, significantly optimizing token sampling during the generation process, and is reported to be up to 80 times faster than open-source alternatives. Structured Outputs aim to provide a robust and efficient solution for converting free-form text into structured data, thereby streamlining tasks such as bulk resume data extraction into JSON format.