This is of course not an easy task because you need someone who can design and implement an end to end system that possibly involves image processing, 'zonal OCR', include an OCR engine and also perform reliable text extraction from images/PDFs (extracting text from PDFs is tricky). Some cases have a lot of templates and need the 'automatic fuzzy matching' functionality and the extra bells and whistles.īut smaller players often deal with just a handful of relatively simple templates where FlexiCapture would just be overkill (not to mention a couple of other problems that I'm covering at the end of the post). I think it boils down to the needs of each individual application. Just to be sure that we're talking about the same thing, by 'custom parser' I meant implementing your own barebones 'zonal OCR' functionality with just the features that are needed for the specific problem. FlexiCapture will do 95%+ accuracy out of the box (on a character by character basis) with no human verification. I haven't used Nuance's stuff much but ABBYY's products are actually incredibly robust under the hood- stuff you wouldn't want to build yourself unless you absolutely had to.

There's still a need for on-prem style solutions for people doing huge volumes (hundreds of thousands of pages a year), whereas most of the new market entrants are cloud only.ĥ. The market for complex data extraction (at least the kind of stuff I do) may not actually be big enough for smaller players to bother pursuing (most new players are going after tasks of intermediate difficulty, like invoice and receipt capture).Ĥ. ABBYY and Nuance have a lot of IP in the space on lock.ģ. There are alternatives for simple capture tasks (like DocParser), but not for complex ones.Ģ. ABBYY and Nuance are the only ones with products that can handle it.

The commercial stuff is really for extraction of structured info from unstructured and semi-structured documents. Anyone who's just doing full-page OCR has no business using one of these commercial offerings. Lots of reasons they haven't been wiped off the map.ġ.

Best ocr software 2017