AWS Textract: Extract Text from Documents

Watch the full video on YouTube: AWS Textract | Tutorial | Extract Text from Documents 

Extracting text from scanned documents, PDFs, and images is a common need in many businesses. Doing it manually is slow and error-prone. AWS Textract solves this by using machine learning to automatically read and extract text from your documents.

In this tutorial, you will learn what AWS Textract is, how it works, and how to use it to extract text, forms, and tables from documents. Whether you are processing invoices, receipts, or contracts, Textract can handle it.

What Is AWS Textract?

Amazon Textract is a fully managed AWS service that uses machine learning to extract printed text, handwriting, and structured data from documents. Unlike basic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools, Textract understands the layout and structure of your documents.

Textract can identify:

• Plain text — paragraphs, lines, and words
• Forms — key-value pairs like “Name: John Smith”
• Tables — rows and columns of data
• Signatures — detect the presence of signatures

You do not need any machine learning experience to use it. You send a document, and Textract returns the extracted data in a structured JSON format.

How AWS Textract Works

Textract provides three main APIs depending on what you need to extract:

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Processing

Textract supports two processing modes:

• Synchronous — Send a single-page document and get results immediately. Best for real-time processing of single pages.
• Asynchronous — Submit multi-page documents (like PDFs) and poll for results. Best for batch processing and large files.

For documents stored in Amazon S3, you can use either mode. For documents sent as raw bytes, only synchronous processing is available.

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Watch the full tutorial on our AI360Xpert YouTube channel .