Azure AI Form Recognizer

What is Azure AI Form Recognizer?

Azure AI Form Recognizer is a cloud-based AI service that uses machine learning to extract text, key-value pairs, tables, and structure from your forms and documents. It can analyze various document types, including invoices, receipts, identity documents, and custom forms, providing structured data that can be easily processed and integrated into your applications and workflows.

Form Recognizer offers pre-built models for common document types and allows you to train custom models tailored to your specific business needs. This helps automate data extraction processes, reduce manual data entry, and improve operational efficiency.

Getting Started

To begin using Azure AI Form Recognizer, you'll need to:

1. Create an Azure Account: If you don't have one, sign up for a free Azure account.
2. Create a Form Recognizer Resource: In the Azure portal, create a new Form Recognizer resource to get your API keys and endpoint.
3. Install the SDK or Use REST API: Choose your preferred development method. Azure provides SDKs for various languages (Python, C#, Java, JavaScript) and a comprehensive REST API.
4. Analyze Your First Document: Use a pre-built model or train a custom model to extract data from your documents.

Key Features

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Extracts printed and handwritten text from documents.
• Layout Analysis: Understands the structure of documents, including paragraphs, headings, and page elements.
• Form Fields and Tables: Identifies and extracts key-value pairs (e.g., "Invoice Number: 12345") and tabular data.
• Pre-built Models: Offers specialized models for invoices, receipts, identity documents (passports, driver's licenses), and business cards.
• Custom Models: Train your own models with your specific form types for tailored data extraction.
• Document Translation: Seamlessly integrate with Azure AI Translator for multilingual document processing.
• Secure and Scalable: Leverages Azure's robust cloud infrastructure for security, reliability, and scalability.

How It Works

Form Recognizer processes your documents in a few key steps:

1. Document Upload: You submit your document (e.g., PDF, JPEG, PNG) to the Form Recognizer service.
2. Analysis: The service applies OCR and machine learning models to analyze the document's content and structure.
3. Data Extraction: Based on the model used (pre-built or custom), Form Recognizer extracts the relevant information.
4. Output: The extracted data is returned in a structured JSON format, ready for consumption.

Common Use Cases

• Invoice Processing: Automate the extraction of invoice numbers, vendor names, line items, and totals.
• Receipt Scanning: Capture expense details, dates, and merchant information from receipts.
• Identity Document Verification: Extract names, dates of birth, document numbers, and expiry dates from passports and driver's licenses.
• Customer Onboarding: Streamline the processing of application forms and supporting documents.
• Claims Processing: Extract critical information from insurance claim forms.
• Data Migration: Convert legacy paper documents into digital, structured data.

API Reference

Explore the comprehensive API reference for Form Recognizer, covering all available operations, parameters, and response formats.

Tutorials and Samples

Dive into detailed tutorials and code samples to learn how to integrate Form Recognizer into your applications using different SDKs and programming languages.

Pricing

Understand the pricing models for Azure AI Form Recognizer, including free tiers and pay-as-you-go options for different features and transaction volumes.