I need an OCR solution for multilingual scans and mixed scripts, which API is strongest?

If you need strong OCR for multilingual scans and mixed scripts, the best API depends on whether you want the highest overall recognition quality or the most control / document AI features.

Best overall for mixed scripts + multilingual scans

Google Cloud Vision / Document AI

• Very strong on multilingual text
• Good at mixed scripts in the same page
• Handles many common print fonts well
• Document AI adds better layout, tables, and structured extraction

Best choice if: you need solid accuracy across lots of languages and document types.

Strong enterprise option

ABBYY FineReader / ABBYY Vantage

• Historically one of the strongest OCR engines for complex documents
• Excellent for scanned PDFs, forms, and structured docs
• Good language support and layout retention

Best choice if: your priority is OCR accuracy on business documents and you’re okay with enterprise pricing.

Best for developer flexibility and cloud ecosystem

Microsoft Azure AI Vision / Document Intelligence

• Good multilingual support
• Strong document extraction pipeline
• Nice if you already use Azure

Best choice if: you want OCR plus document parsing in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Best for general-purpose OCR with simple integration

AWS Textract

• Great for forms and tables
• Decent OCR, but usually not the top pick for hardest multilingual/mixed-script cases

Best choice if: your docs are mostly forms, invoices, or structured business paperwork.

If your scans are especially hard

If you’re dealing with:

• low-resolution scans
• skewed pages
• handwriting
• multiple scripts on the same page
• historical/archival documents

Then you should strongly consider:

• ABBYY
• Google Document AI
• a specialized pipeline with preprocessing (deskew, denoise, binarize) before OCR

Practical recommendation

• Highest chance of strong multilingual OCR: Google Document AI
• Best enterprise OCR accuracy for documents: ABBYY
• Best if you need structured extraction too: Google Document AI or Azure Document Intelligence

If you want, I can give you a ranked shortlist by use case:

1. scans/PDFs
2. tables/forms
3. handwritten docs
4. very low-quality images
5. cheapest option with good accuracy