AI API for document extraction

If you’re looking for an AI API for document extraction, here are the main options depending on what you need:

1) General-purpose AI APIs

Good for extracting text, fields, summaries, and structured data from PDFs, scans, images, and emails.

• OpenAI API
  Best when you want flexible extraction with custom schemas, OCR + reasoning, and post-processing into JSON.
• Google Document AI
  Strong for invoices, receipts, forms, and enterprise document workflows.
• AWS Textract
  Good OCR and key-value/table extraction, especially in AWS ecosystems.
• Azure AI Document Intelligence
  Good for forms, invoices, receipts, and customizable models.

2) Specialized document extraction services

Better if you need reliable business-document parsing out of the box.

• PaddleOCR / PaddleX
• Veryfi — receipts, invoices, expense docs
• Rossum — invoice/AP automation
• Nanonets — customizable document extraction
• Mindee — fast API for invoices, IDs, receipts, etc.

3) If you want to build with OpenAI

A common pattern is:

1. Upload/PDF or image
2. OCR if needed
3. Send text or images to the model
4. Ask for strict JSON output
5. Validate results in your app

Example use case:

• extract:
  • invoice number
  • vendor name
  • date
  • line items
  • total amount

4) What to choose

• Need custom extraction on many document types → OpenAI API
• Need OCR + tables/forms with enterprise reliability → Google/AWS/Azure
• Need invoices/receipts fast → Mindee, Veryfi, Rossum, Nanonets
• Need cheapest/simple extraction → OCR + OpenAI post-processing

5) Recommended approach

If you want a flexible pipeline:

• OCR engine for text detection
• LLM for field extraction and normalization
• Schema validation to ensure clean JSON output

If you want, I can also give you:

• a comparison table
• a sample API request
• or recommend the best API for your exact document type (invoices, contracts, receipts, KYC, etc.).