What is Amazon Textract and Why is it a Game Changer?

Amazon Textract is a service that extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract was introduced by Amazon Web Services in late November at its AWS re: Invent Conference. That time it was said that Textract will end the OCR industry. In this article, we will discuss how Textract works and how can it change the market.

The documentation for Amazon Textract was first released on November 28, 2018, to accurately extract “text and structured data from virtually any document with no machine learning experience required,” as Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning puts it.

Many companies and organizations need to extract the data from the important documents like a contract or tax documents. Before the introduction of Amazon Textract the companies followed the traditional practice of hiring a person or take the help from OCR but now all the work of extracting the data can be done without any human touch with the help of this new technology.

According to sources, at present, there are 356 current customers using Amazon Textract and it has a market share of 0.10%. Among the industries using Amazon Textract, the top three industries are Artificial Intelligence (27), Machine Learning (27), and Big Data (20). These industries are extensively using Amazon Textract for Data Science and Machine Learning.

Amazon Textract aims to eliminate the manual interfere in the process of extracting the data from scanned documents, even if the data is available in the form of tables and forms. Let’s take a little deeper dive into what exactly Amazon Textract is and how it works.

What is Amazon Textract ?

Textract is Amazon’s offering unders its Web Services which extracts the data virtually from any type of file available in any format. This technology is powered by machine learning and now available for all. To use Textract to extract data from scanned or any other file the user doesn’t need to be expert in this technology.

The service comes with easy to use APIs which make it easier for the end-user to get the desired output. Textract service from Amazon uses API to detect and extract the data from the submitted document.

Amazon Textract is amalgamation of machine learning and OCR. It detects the text, analyzes it and processes it in real-time. Engineers in Amazon have trained the Textract on millions of documents so that machines can virtually recognize the data from any type of document submitted by the user and process it.

How Amazon Textract Works?

As Amazon describes, “Amazon Textract is a machine learning (ML) service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables.” Data is crucial for every organization and this is why it is essential to structure and store data in an appropriate manner so that it can be easily discovered. It is quite challenging to store a mass number of physical documents and organize it manually. Even using a simple OCR software manually to “extract data from scanned documents such as PDFs, images, tables, and forms” (as mentioned by Amazon) doesn’t produce desired results. This is when a superior and traversal solution like Amazon Textract is required to manage and organize data.

Let us have a look at the workflow of Amazon Textract to understand how it functions. We will closely analyze the steps involved in the process of extracting and storing data.

• The first step involves scanning documents from where data has to be extracted. You have to be very careful while placing the documents before starting to scan since Amazon Textract will not be able to scan those areas in the documents which will be left out of its scanning radar. The documents can be invoices, financial documents, medical reports, pay slips, handwritten docs, etc.
• The second thing is to read and start virtual scanning of the document. Depending on the length of data, the process is done seamlessly, usually within a short period of time.
• Once the reading and scanning are completed, Amazon Textract automatically understands what crucial and vital information needs to be extracted and stored. With its extensive machine learning capabilities, it secures the information correctly as well as accurately.
• In the final stage, data is extracted and stored successfully which is also ready to get integrated with other AWS systems. The output has now been prepared and the extracted data is now indexed to enable searches.

Amazon Textract is a high-scalable and deep-learning technology that is packed with easy-to-use APIs for processing image and PDF files. It is equipped to learn from new data and continuously upgrades itself by adding new features. Most importantly, it takes only a few minutes and not long hours or days for extracting data. This allows you to act immediately as needed as soon as it completes the process of extraction for you. For example, if you are automating loan processing or extracting information from bills, you can quickly decide what to do next. Moreover, as Amazon describes, you can include “human reviews with Amazon Augmented AI to provide oversight of your models and check sensitive data.”

It is worth mentioning that if you provide data that is familiar to the system, then the results will be naturally brilliant. But if you upload a different kind of data with which Textract is unfamiliar, then it might be slightly difficult for Textract to handle. But this won’t create any major problems as long as Textract performs the upgrading work. Amazon Textract consists of certain significant features which perform crucial tasks. These features are Optical Character Recognition, Form Extraction, Table Extraction, Query Based Extraction, Signature Detection, Handwriting Recognition, Invoices and Receipts, Identity Documents, Bounding Boxes, Adjustable Confidence Thresholds, Built-in Human Review Workflow, and Amazon Textract Pricing.

In a nutshell, Amazon Textract paves the way for operations related to processing small, single-page, documents to be in sync with close real-time responses. On the other hand, it also comprises asynchronous operations that can be used to process larger, multipage documents but not in real-time. While processing a document, Amazon Textract produces the results in an array of Block objects or in an array of ExpenseDocument objects. But both the objects are packed with information detected about items, including their location on the document as well as their relation to other items on the document.

To understand how Textract works have a look at the easiest possible workflow of Textract;

By now, we are clear about the concept of Amazon Textract and the way it works. Now, it is time to dig deeper into its working.

How Amazon Textract actually works:

Why Textract is a Game Changer

Now you know how the Amazon Textract works and how easy it will become to extract the data from different kind of format with the help of this service from Amazon. OCR (optical character recognition) is another software that offers the same facility to its users but Textract is easier and smarter than the OCR so with the launch of Texture the market OCR will get affected surely.

The biggest and the most common problem with OCR is it converts the data but not it recognized way. For example, if you want to convert a scanned copy of a price list into a soft copy then OCR will do but the output will not be perfect and it would need a human touch. Amazon Textract is all set to end the human interference in the conversion task from documents to file.

Considering the expertise on Textract in data extraction over OCR it is obvious that people will think that the end of OCR has come. OCR is actually a mature technology and it is helping the users for a long time. It’s not good in giving the perfect results but those users who extract the same type of files are satisfied with the services of this old technology.

Now when the general availability of Texture has been announced then it will be interesting to watch how the market would react to this wonderful product. Till now the banking firms and insurance companies were taking help from OCR which hardly gives the perfect output when the tables are in the document. End of the day the companies have to hire MIS executive to complete the task. But as Amazon says that Textract works on Artificial Intelligence and it identifies the details of documents so it’s easy for it to give just the right output.

Major Benefits of Amazon Textract

Amazon Textract is extensively used across industries because of its machine-learning capabilities to extract data from printed text, handwritten, and any other document format. Now, we will discuss the major benefits of Amazon Textract one by one.

Codes are not required for every document

The machine learning models of Amazon Textract are already trained to manage tens of millions of documents across different industries, including invoices/bills, receipts, contracts, sales docs, tax documents, policy papers, etc. This is why you don’t need to write codes for every document while extracting data.

Seamless integration and easy setup

Textract is an easy-to-use machine learning and gets smoothly integrated with other Amazon services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon Comprehend, etc.

Ensures prompt and accurate data extraction

Amazon Textract ensures quick and accurate extraction of data from different types of documents. Also, it carefully reads a document, detects vital information from it, understands relationships among data from tables or forms, and extracts all the relevant information. This enables you to immediately use the extracted data, respond to it immediately, and store it in a database without requiring complex codes.

Adds human reviews easily

Textract is packed with Amazon Augmented AI that enables you to add your reviews and monitor sensitive data to receive accurate or near-accurate predictions or to audit predictions.

Maintains AWS shared responsibility model

Amazon Textract firmly maintains the AWS shared responsibility model including data security policies as well as procedures required to safeguard data. This is why all your sensitive and confidential information is protected with Amazon Textract.

Reduces Costs

With Amazon Textract, you only need to pay for the documents you want to analyze. You start for free as it doesn’t require any minimum fees. Once you start using it, you can then decide to extend your service with a tiered pricing model.

From these benefits, we can understand that it prioritizes its users and makes it way easier to add document text detection and analysis into your applications.

Common Use Cases of Amazon Textract

To understand its complete usability features and extensive services across different industries, it is necessary to analyze the common use cases of Amazon Textract.

Amazon Textract assists operations of Financial Sevices

Amazon Textract efficiently automates loan processing and assists in issuing mortgage applications faster within minutes. Textract reads business data and accurately extracts crucial finance-related information such as loan records, mortgage rates, names of the applicants, and billing records from piles of finance docs.

Amazon Textract Efficiently helps public sector websites

Amazon Textract is extensively used in the government sector to extract sensitive data with accuracy such as business loans, tax applications, and business documents. It is used to ensure accurate results and influence prompt decision-making in vital administrative work.

Amazon Textract eases document automation for healthcare

Amazon Textract is absolutely perfect for easing healthcare duties and streamlining facilities for the industry. Amazon Textract quickly and seamlessly extracts data in raw forms such as medical records, invoices, doctors’ charts, healthcare claims, and health intake forms. This allows hospital authorities to provide better treatment and caring facilities to patients much faster than before. Also, the healthcare sector is able to maintain better as well as personal relations with patients.

This indicates are gradually more and more industries are expanding and streamlining their services using this extremely convenient data extraction service. Since Textract works on AI, it identifies the content of the documents very easily and captures all relevant information. This is why it can provide the right output in no time without requiring hours or days.

The Conclusion

Amazon says that their product Textract is more than OCR++ services as it recognizes the tables, rows, and columns in a document and extracts the data from it accordingly. As Amazon claims that the new service from AWS will require the minimum human interfere so it can be believed that all extracting work will take less time and will get completed at a lesser cost.

Those users who want to use Amazon Textract, have to create an Amazon account first. A free trial of the software is also available for interested users. In the free trial, AWS customers can analyze up to 1,000 pages per month. According to HG Insights, the leading companies currently using Amazon Textract are Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Synectics, Gilead Sciences, and others.

Since Amazon Textract is helping businesses, so we want to hear its review from you too.

FAQs

What is Amazon Textract?

Amazon Textract is a document analysis service powered by Machine Learning (ML) that efficiently transforms various types of documents into customizable formats by extracting text, data, and even handwriting from scanned documents automatically. The best thing about this service is that the user doesn’t have to be a techno savvy to perform the task of extracting data. The service offers user-friendly APIs which make it convenient for the end-user to get the desired results. The Textract service from Amazon uses API to seamlessly detect and extract the data from the submitted document. It doesn’t require user intervention to read and analyze any type of document for extracting text, handwriting, tables, and other data forms because it utilizes machine learning.

Does Amazon Textract store data?

With Amazon Textract, you can be sure of the fact that your data either normal or sensitive is absolutely safe. This is because any content or document analyzed by Amazon Textract is encrypted and stored safely in the AWS region where you are accessing Amazon Textract. Amazon Textract promotes high security measures and accuracy.

What type of document formats can be used in Amazon Textract?

At present Amazon Textract supports PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and PDF formats. If you go for synchronous APIs on Textract then you need to upload images either as an S3 object or as a byte array. In case of asynchronous APIs, you can upload S3 objects. If you have your document prepared in one of the file formats supported by Textract such as PDF, TIFF, JPG or PNG, then you don’t need to convert or compress data before submitting it to Amazon Textract.

How do I get started with Amazon Textract?

In order to start using Amazon Textract, you need to create an Amazon service account first and click on the “Get Started with Amazon Textract” option on the Amazon Textract page. Remember it is mandatory to have an AWS service account but in case you don’t have one, then you will be asked to create one. As soon as you are signed in to your AWS account, you can start with Amazon Textract with your own images or PDF documents by using the Amazon Textract Management Console. Please refer to Getting Started Guide on your AWS account to find out more details about the service.