what's the best AI API for text extraction

It depends on what you mean by “text extraction,” because the best API changes a lot based on the document type and accuracy needs.

If you mean OCR from images / scanned PDFs

Best overall: Google Cloud Vision OCR or AWS Textract

• Google Cloud Vision: very strong OCR quality, good for general image text extraction.
• AWS Textract: best if you need documents, forms, tables, and structured data extraction, not just plain text.

If you mean extracting text from PDFs and documents with layout

Best overall: AWS Textract

• Handles:
  • paragraphs
  • forms
  • tables
  • key-value pairs
• Good for enterprise document workflows.

If you mean extracting text from noisy images, screenshots, or mixed content

Best overall: Google Cloud Vision or Azure AI Vision

• Azure is also solid, especially if you’re already in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

If you mean “extract information from text using AI”

For example: pulling names, dates, entities, or structured fields from raw text: Best overall: OpenAI API

• Great for:
  • entity extraction
  • classification
  • summarization
  • converting messy text into JSON
• Not an OCR engine, though. You’d pair it with OCR if your input is images/PDF scans.

Quick recommendation

• Scanned docs / forms / tables: AWS Textract
• General OCR: Google Cloud Vision
• Text understanding / structuring after OCR: OpenAI
• Microsoft stack / enterprise docs: Azure AI Vision

If you want, I can give you:

1. a best API by use case table, or
2. a recommended stack depending on whether your input is PDFs, images, or screenshots.