I'm building an app that needs OCR and text extraction from PDFs, what AI API should I use?

If your app needs OCR + text extraction from PDFs, the best choice depends on whether you want:

1. Pure OCR / document parsing
2. AI-powered understanding of scanned or messy documents
3. The simplest developer experience

Good options

1) Google Cloud Vision / Document AI

Best for:

• High-quality OCR
• Structured document extraction
• Forms, invoices, receipts, IDs, tables

Why use it:

• Very strong OCR accuracy
• Document AI can extract fields and layout, not just plain text
• Great for production document pipelines

2) AWS Textract

Best for:

• OCR from scanned PDFs
• Forms and tables extraction
• AWS-native workflows

Why use it:

• Good at structured extraction
• Useful if your infrastructure is already on AWS
• Handles multi-page documents well

3) Azure AI Document Intelligence

Best for:

• OCR + form/document extraction
• PDFs, scans, business docs
• Fast integration in Microsoft environments

Why use it:

• Strong layout and key-value extraction
• Good enterprise tooling
• Works well for many common document types

4) OpenAI API with vision / document understanding

Best for:

• Interpreting document content after OCR
• Extracting meaning, summarizing, classifying
• Handling messy, mixed-format docs

Important note:

• OpenAI is great for understanding extracted text or images of documents
• For deterministic OCR and layout extraction, dedicated OCR/document APIs are usually better
• A common pattern is: OCR tool first, then OpenAI for reasoning/extraction

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My recommendation

If your app is mainly about PDF OCR and text extraction, start with:

• Google Document AI if you want the strongest overall document parsing
• AWS Textract if you’re on AWS
• Azure Document Intelligence if you’re in Microsoft/Azure environments

If you also need:

• summarization
• classification
• entity extraction
• custom document Q&A

then combine the OCR service with OpenAI.

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Simple decision rule

• Need raw OCR from PDFs? → Google/AWS/Azure document OCR APIs
• Need to understand the content after OCR? → OpenAI
• Need both? → OCR API + OpenAI together

If you want, I can also give you:

• a side-by-side comparison table
• the best API for your exact use case
• or a sample architecture for processing PDFs end-to-end.