Explore Azure AI options for reading text

There are multiple Azure AI services that read text from documents and images, each optimized for results depending on the input and the specific requirements of your application.

Azure AI Vision

Azure AI Vision includes an image analysis capability that supports optical character recognition (OCR). Consider using Azure AI Vision in the following scenarios:

• Text location and extraction from scanned documents: Azure AI Vision is a great solution for general, unstructured documents that have been scanned as images. For example, reading text in labels, menus, or business cards.
• Finding and reading text in photographs: Examples include photo's that include street signs and store names.
• Digital asset management (DAM): Azure AI Vision includes functionality for analyzing images beyond extracting text; including object detection, describing or categorizing an image, generating smart-cropped thumbnails and more. These capabilities make it a useful service when you need to catalog, index, or analyze large volumes of digital image-based content.

Azure AI Document Intelligence

Azure AI Document Intelligence is a service that you can use to extract information from complex digital documents. Azure AI Document Intelligence is designed for extracting text, key-value pairs, tables, and structures from documents automatically and accurately. Key considerations for choosing Azure AI Document Intelligence include:

• Form processing: Azure AI Document Intelligence is specifically designed to extract data from forms, invoices, receipts, and other structured documents.
• Prebuilt models: Azure AI Document Intelligence provides prebuilt models for common document types to reduce complexity and integrate into workflows or applications.
• Custom models: Creating custom models tailored to your specific documents, makes Azure AI Document Intelligence a flexible solution that can be used in many business scenarios.

Azure AI Content Understanding

Azure AI Content Understanding is a service that you can use to analyze and extract information from multiple kinds of content; including documents, images, audio streams, and video. It is suitable for:

• Multimodal content extraction: Extracting content and structured fields from documents, forms, audio, video, and images.
• Custom content analysis scenarios: Support for customizable analyzers enables you to extract specific content or fields tailored to business needs.