Analyze easily text in images with AI: OCR + Translation + Text mining (NLP)

In this article, we show how employing AI pipeline easily allows you to solve complex use cases requiring and combining OCR and text analysis (NLP).

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What are the available options to build an OCR & NLP pipeline?

With AI services, you can build pipelines that solve common issues. When you need an OCR engine to detect text in your data, you often need other engines to analyze or transcribe the text detected. To solve this problem, you have multiple options using AI:

• First option: multiple open source OCR and NLP engines exist, they are free to use.  Some of them can be performant but it can be complex to set up and use. Using an open source AI library requires data science expertise. Moreover, you will need to set up a server internally to run open source engines.
• Second option: you can use engines from your cloud provider. Actually, cloud providers like Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud or IBM Watson are all providing multiple AI engines for vision, text, translation, prediction or speech. This option looks very easy because you already have all engines centralized in the same platform so you can easily access the AI engines. Additionally, you can stay in a known environment where you might have abilities in your company.

But you can’t be sure that the engines from your cloud provider offer the best performance, rapidity and prices. Moreover, it is possible that your cloud provider does not provide the engine you are looking for because they do not provide all AI services available on the market.

The third option is the multi-cloud strategy, which we recommend. Depending on your data (quantity, type, quality, etc.) and the technology you require (object detection, OCR invoice, explicit content detection, syntax analysis, text-to-speech, etc.), the performance rankings amongst the various suppliers will always change. Each sort of engine has a large number of providers, including large cloud providers and AI experts. Here are some instances of rankings made using various data sets:

• OCR
• Face detection
• Custom Vision
• Object Detection
• AutoML
• Speech-to-Text

The Multi cloud approach

The only method to identify the best provider is to compare the engines of many providers with your data and pick the best OCR combination of results from various providers. If cost is one of your top concerns, you can also compare prices and do so for speed.The OCR engine and text analysis engines that are most suited and most powerful for your data and project can be built into powerful AI pipelines using this technique.

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This method is the best in terms of performance and optimization but it presents many inconveniences like:

• you may not know every performant providers on the market
• you need to subscribe and contract with all providers
• you need to master each providers API documentation
• you need to check their pricings
• You need to process data in each engine to realize the benchmark

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How Eden AI can help you?

Eden AI is really helpful in this situation. Simply sign up and create an Eden AI account to gain access to the engines of numerous providers for a variety of technologies (vision, NLP, speech, OCR, translation, and prediction). You may compare and visualize the results from several engines using the platform, and you can also have a consolidated pricing for using various providers.

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Here is an example of a pipeline:

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Eden AI provides the same easy to use API with the same documentation for every technology. You can use Eden AI API to call OCR, Keyword Extraction and Translation for example, with provider as a simple parameter. With only few lines, you can set up your project in production :

OCR:

Translation:

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Keyword Extraction:

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The pipeline is built very easily, and Eden AI allows you to go further. Provider is a parameter that allows you to set up with 2 lines of code a fallback provider in case the first one is down. You can also combine providers' results if you can’t get the performance you are looking for with only one provider’s engine.

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Here's a video showing how Eden AI works:

There are hundreds of AI engines on the market; it is hard to know about them all or to identify the ones that perform well. Most of the time, you employ multiple engines in a pipeline to handle your data (for instance, OCR and NLP). The multi-cloud strategy is the most effective way to design this pipeline since it ensures that you will get the greatest costs and performance for each technology. This strategy appears to be complex, but Eden AI, which centralizes the top providers of APIs for each technology, makes it easier to understand.

You are a solution provider and want to integrate Eden AI, contact us at : contact@edenai.co

This article is brought to you by the Eden AI team. We allow you to test and use in production a large number of AI engines from different providers directly through our API and platform. In this article, we expose how using AI pipeline easily allows you to solve complex use cases requiring and combining OCR and text analysis (NLP).

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