Company
Date Published
Author
Balaram Sarkar
Word count
2841
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The text discusses the evolving landscape of text extraction technologies, comparing Large Language Models (LLMs) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Despite advancements in LLMs and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), OCR remains crucial for applications requiring high accuracy, such as financial records and legal documents, due to its reliability and efficiency on low-power devices. OCR's consistency in structured output and the provision of confidence scores make it preferable over LLMs, which can produce hallucinations and lack reliability. A benchmark of various OCR APIs, including commercial solutions like Google Cloud Vision AI and open-source models like PaddleOCR, evaluates them on metrics such as accuracy, latency, and cost. Google Cloud Vision AI emerges as a top performer in accuracy, while Azure AI Document Intelligence proves cost-effective. The study concludes that OCR is indispensable for precise text extraction, complementing LLMs in a combined approach for enhanced document processing and interpretation.