Amazon Textract — Cloud OCR & Data Extraction
AWS machine learning service that extracts text, handwriting, and structured data from documents using cloud-based OCR and AI analysis.
Product Overview
What is Amazon Textract
Amazon Textract is a machine learning service specializing in OCR (optical character recognition) that automatically extracts text, handwriting, tables, forms, and data from scanned documents. AWS Textract focuses specifically on document extraction, making it the most economical option for bulk processing at scale. The AWS Textract service provides both synchronous APIs for small documents and asynchronous processing for large multipage PDFs, returning structured data as blocks with relationships.
Amazon Comprehend
Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to uncover insights from unstructured text within documents. It extracts key phrases, entities, sentiment, language detection, and can classify documents or identify personally identifiable information (PII) for redaction. While Amazon Textract reads documents, Comprehend interprets their meaning by understanding context, entities, and sentiment within the text.
Amazon Bedrock Data Automation
Amazon Bedrock Data Automation significantly advances IDP by introducing confidence scoring, bounding box data, automatic classification, and rapid development through blueprints. It handles the complexity of document processing and information extraction using generative AI, optimizing for both performance and accuracy without requiring expertise in prompt engineering. BDA leverages generative AI to automate the transformation of multi-modal data (documents, images, video, and audio) into structured formats, enabling intelligent document processing workflows at scale.
Overview
Amazon Textract, launched by AWS, has evolved from a standalone OCR service into a foundational component within AWS's generative AI document processing ecosystem. In July 2025, Nippon India Mutual Fund achieved 95% accuracy improvement in AI assistant responses using Amazon Textract's advanced table parsing capabilities within their RAG solution. By August 2025, AWS repositioned Textract AWS as a specialized component in their open-source IDP solution for organizations requiring regulatory compliance or custom logic beyond managed services.
The AWS Textract service gained enterprise validation through Maximus's FedRAMP-authorized platform serving federal agencies including the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Veterans Affairs. In late 2025, Myriad Genetics achieved 77% cost reduction and improved classification accuracy from 94% to 98% using AWS's GenAI IDP Accelerator with Amazon Textract as the OCR foundation.
However, competitive pressure emerged in December 2025 when Mistral OCR 3 claimed superior table extraction accuracy (96.6% vs 84.8%) while undercutting AWS Textract pricing by 97%.
How Amazon Textract processes documents
Amazon Textract combines text and handwriting extraction with structure-preserving recognition of forms and tables, maintaining relationships between data elements. The platform offers query-based extraction using natural language queries for specific information retrieval, while specialized AnalyzeID API handles passports and driver's licenses. Expense analysis capabilities extract line-item data from invoices and receipts, with native AWS integration connecting S3, Lambda, Bedrock, Comprehend, and DynamoDB. Human-in-the-loop processing through Amazon A2I integration ensures financial services compliance requirements.
Use Cases
Healthcare Document Processing
Flo Health deployed AWS Textract within their MACROS solution to process thousands of medical articles annually, using Lambda functions triggered by Step Functions to extract text from PDF medical documents for automated content verification.
Enterprise Property Management
CBRE's PULSE system processes over eight million documents using Amazon Textract for asynchronous text extraction from PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel files, and images through automated S3-triggered workflows.
Financial Services Processing
Organizations leverage AWS Textract with Amazon A2I integration for human-in-the-loop processing of high-value transactional documents, targeting the digital payments market projected to exceed $15 trillion globally by 2027.
Technical Specifications
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Deployment | Cloud-based SaaS (AWS) |
| API Types | Synchronous and asynchronous processing |
| Document Formats | PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF |
| Max File Size | 10MB (synchronous), 500MB (asynchronous) |
| Languages | English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Portuguese |
| Handwriting | English only |
| Processing Types | DetectDocumentText, AnalyzeDocument, AnalyzeExpense, AnalyzeID |
| Output Format | JSON with confidence scores |
| API Quota | 10 requests per second (default) |
| Integration | S3, Lambda, Bedrock, Comprehend, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, SageMaker |
| Pricing Model | Pay-per-page processed |
Resources
- AWS Textract Homepage
- Textract Documentation
- GenAI IDP Accelerator
- Getting Started Guide
- Textract Pricing
Company Information
Provider: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Parent Company: Amazon.com, Inc. Service Type: Machine learning API service Deployment: Cloud-based (AWS global infrastructure) Pricing: Pay-as-you-go per page processed Availability: Multiple AWS regions worldwide