OCR (optical character recognition): definition

OCR turns an image of text, such as a scanned invoice or a photo of a form, into machine-readable text, which is the first step in automating any paper-based process.

A huge amount of business data is trapped in images and PDFs: invoices, receipts, contracts, forms. OCR reads the text out of them so it can be processed, and modern OCR combined with a language model can also understand the structure, not just the characters.

It is the quiet workhorse behind document intelligence, turning a pile of scans into structured data a system can actually use.

Related terms

Multimodal AI: Multimodal AI is a model that can take in or produce more than one kind of data, such as text plus images, audio, or video, rather than text alone.
Workflow automation: Workflow automation is the practice of moving a repeatable business process from manual steps to a system that runs it end to end, with a person involved only where judgement is actually needed.
Structured output: Structured output is when a model is made to return data in a strict format such as JSON, so another system can use the result directly instead of parsing free text.