OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Quick Answer
OCR is the technology that extracts machine-readable text from images and scanned documents. Modern OCR is now closely paired with layout understanding and AI extraction, turning scanned documents into structured data for downstream systems.
In Depth
What OCR (Optical Character Recognition) really means
Traditional OCR focused on character recognition. Modern document AI combines OCR with language models to understand tables, forms and complex layouts, outputting structured fields rather than a wall of text.
Accuracy depends heavily on scan quality, language, layout complexity and whether the document is a handwritten form, a printed invoice, or a digitally generated PDF.
Why It Matters
Business relevance for UK organisations
UK finance, legal and insurance teams use OCR and document AI to eliminate hours of manual data entry from invoices, contracts, claims forms and onboarding documents.
Real-world example
How this shows up in practice
A Bristol insurance broker deployed document AI across inbound claims PDFs, cutting average data-entry time per claim from 14 minutes to under 90 seconds.
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