OCR & Document Understanding

OCR

Part of: Multimodal AI: Vision & Images

For decades, "read the text in this photo" was its own brittle industry: scan, threshold, segment, guess each letter, pray the table lines up. A vision model collapses that pipeline into one prompt, and it can do something the old tools never could: not just read the receipt, but tell you the tip percentage. This lesson covers the move from reading characters to interpreting documents. What it is OCR , optical character recognition, is pulling the text out of an image: a scanned page, a screenshot, a photo of a sign. Classic OCR stops there; it hands you a wall of characters. Document understanding goes further: it reads the image and interprets its structure and meaning, such as which number is the total, which cell is the date, what the form is asking. A vision model does both in one step because it treats the words it reads as ordinary text it can then reason over. How it works A document request is just a vision request with an instruction that asks for the text or for facts drawn from it: Two stages happen inside that single call: 1. Recognition. The vision encoder turns the page into image tokens; the model reads the glyphs as text. 2. Interpretation. Because that text now li

Challenge: The Extraction Auditor