[HN Gopher] Mistral OCR 3
___________________________________________________________________
Mistral OCR 3
Author : pember
Score : 665 points
Date : 2025-12-18 15:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
| pzo wrote:
| there has been so many open source OCR in the last 3 months that
| would be good to compare to those especially when some are not
| even 1B params and can be run on edge devices.
|
| - paddleOCR-VL
|
| - olmOCR-2
|
| - chandra
|
| - dots.ocr
|
| I kind of miss there is not many leaderboard sections or arena
| for OCR and CV and providers hosting those. Neglected on both
| Artificial Analysis and OpenRouter.
| pzo wrote:
| what I like in MistralOCR is that they have simple pricing
| $1/1k pages and API hosted on their servers. With other OCR is
| hard to compare pricing because are token based and you don't
| know how many tokens is the image unless you run your own test.
|
| E.g. with Gemini 3.0 flash you might seem that model pricing
| increased only slightly comparing to Gemini 2.5 flash until you
| test it and will see that what used to be 258 per 384x384 input
| tokens now is around 3x more.
| gunalx wrote:
| But they doubled the price g for this new mistralocr3 model
| to 2$
| amelius wrote:
| Simple would be to bill per character.
|
| Now I have to figure out how large a page can be.
| hereme888 wrote:
| https://www.codesota.com/ocr
| culi wrote:
| Someone posted a project here about a month ago where they
| compare models in head-to-head matchups similar to llmarena
|
| https://www.ocrarena.ai/leaderboard
|
| Hasn't been updated for Mistral but so far gemeni seems to top
| the leaderboard.
| jeffbee wrote:
| OCR developers from decades past must be slapping their
| foreheads now that it seems users will wait a whole minute
| per page and be happy.
| delaminator wrote:
| What they are happy about is accurate OCR.
|
| Getting the wrong answer really quickly is not the best
| goal.
| culi wrote:
| You can also sort by latency. dots.ocr has the lowest at
| 3.8s/page. And although it doesn't fare very well against
| much larger slower models, it's still streets ahead of
| traditional OCR techniques
| andai wrote:
| How can something have a very high ELO but a very low win
| rate?
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| You don't loose any elo if your opponent is much stronger
| than you. Remis could in theory play a part as well.
| pplonski86 wrote:
| very nice comparison! I'd like to see on what examples OCR
| engines fail
| andai wrote:
| I spent like three hours trying to get one of these running and
| then gave up. I think the paddleOCR one.
|
| It took an hour and a half to install 12 gigabytes of pytorch
| dependencies that can't even run on my device, and then it told
| me it had some sort of versioning conflict. (I think I was
| supposed to use UV, but I had run out of steam by that point.)
|
| Maybe I should have asked Claude to install it for me. I gave
| Claude root on a $3 VPS, and it seems to enjoy the sysadmin
| stuff a lot more than I do...
|
| Incidentally I had a similar experience installing open web
| UI... It installed 12 GB of pytorch crap.. I rage quit and
| deleted the whole thing, and replicated the functionality I
| actually needed in 100 lines of HTML.... Too bad I can't do
| that with OCR ;)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| gemini-cli is good for this sort of thing. You can just tell
| it "Find out why xyz.py doesn't run" and let it crunch. It
| will try reasonably hard to get you out of Python dependency
| hell, and (more important) it generally knows when to give
| up.
|
| But yes, in general, you want to use uv. Otherwise, the next
| Python application you install WILL break the last one you
| installed.
|
| I suppose you could use gemini-cli as a substitute for proper
| Python virtual environment management, always letting it fix
| whatever broke since the last time you tried to run the
| program, but that'd be like burning down a rainforest to
| toast a marshmallow.
| andai wrote:
| Actually, I just remembered, this was inside uv!
| Tiberium wrote:
| From a tweet: https://x.com/i/status/2001821298109120856
|
| > can someone help folks at Mistral find more weak baselines to
| add here? since they can't stomach comparing with SoTA....
|
| > (in case y'all wanna fix it: Chandra, dots.ocr, olmOCR, MinerU,
| Monkey OCR, and PaddleOCR are a good start)
| belval wrote:
| I've worked on document extraction a lot and while the tweet is
| too flippant for my taste, it's not wrong. Mistral is comparing
| itself to non-VLM computer vision services. While not
| necessarily what everyone needs, they are a very different
| beasts compared to VLM based extraction because it gives you
| precise bounding boxes, usually at the cost of larger "document
| understanding".
|
| Its failure mode are also vastly different. VLM-based
| extraction can misread entire sentences or miss entire
| paragraphs. Sonnet 3 had that issue. Computer vision models
| instead will make in-word typos.
| wills_forward wrote:
| Why not use both? I just built a pipeline for document data
| extraction that uses PaddleOCR, then Gemini 3 to check + fix
| errors. It gets close to 99.9% on extraction from financial
| statements finally on par with humans.
| jadbox wrote:
| This is The Way. Remember AI doesn't have to replace
| existing solutions but can tactfully supplement it.
| vrc wrote:
| I did the opposite. Tesseract to get bboxes, words, and
| chars and then mistral on the clips with some reasonable
| reflow to preserve geometry. Paddle wasn't working on my
| local machine (until I found RapidOCR). Surya was also very
| good but because you can't really tweak any knobs, when it
| failed it just kinda failed. But Surya > Rapid w/ Paddle >
| DocTr > Tesseract while the latter gave me the most
| granularity when I needed it.
|
| Edit: Gemini 2.0 was good enough for VLM cleanup, and now
| 2.5 or above with structured output make reconstruction
| even easier.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Is DeepSeek's not VLM?
| logicprog wrote:
| I'd want to see a comparison with Qwen 3 VL 235B-A22B, which is
| IME significantly better than MinerU.
| vinckr wrote:
| after clicking on your link I browsed twitter for a minute and
| damn that place has become weird (or maybe it always was?)
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| As someone who has been on Twitter since 2007, it's radically
| changed in the last few years to the point of being
| unrecognizable.
| ozgune wrote:
| Also, do you know if their benchmarks are available?
|
| In their website, the benchmarks say "Multilingual (Chinese),
| Multilingual (East-asian), Multilingual (Eastern europe),
| Multilingual (English), Multilingual (Western europe), Forms,
| Handwritten, etc." However, there's no reference to the
| benchmark data.
| nerbert wrote:
| On the OP link, they compare themselves to the capabilities of
| leaderboard AI's and beat them.
| petcat wrote:
| It seems like Mistral is just chasing around sort of "the
| fringes" of what could be useful AI features. Are they just
| getting out-classed by OAI, Google, Anthropic?
|
| It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in
| Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I think there is a lot of broad support, but they're just kind
| of hamstrung by EU regulation on AI development at this stage.
| I think the end game will ultimately be getting acquired by an
| American company, and then relocating.
| tensor wrote:
| I hope the EU blocks any acquisitions by American companies.
| The west needs to start protecting its strategic assets.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Do you have any source on this other than vibes based on"EU
| bad" sentiment?
| tensor wrote:
| Form processing is vastly more useful than meme generation.
| When people need to do real work this is the sort of tool they
| are going to reach for.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Yep. I saw the title and got excited.... this is a particular
| problem area where I think these things can be very
| effective. There are so many data entry class tasks which
| don't require huge knowledge or judgement... just clear
| parsing and putting that into a more machine digestible form.
|
| I don't know... feels like this sort of area, while not
| nearly so sexy as video production or coding or (etc.)... but
| seems like reaching a better-than-human performance level
| should be easier for these kinds of workloads.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested
|
| Maybe, i think it will be to our benefit when the bubble pops
| that we are not heavily invested, no harm investing a little.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I guess it's better to do the same stuff everyone else is
| doing?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Following the leaders too closely seems like a bad move, at
| least until a profitable business model for an AI model
| training company is discovered. Mistral's models are pretty
| good, right? I mean they don't have all the scaffolding around
| them that something like chatGPT does, but building all that
| scaffolding could be wasted effort until a profitable business
| model is shown.
|
| Until then, they seem to be able to keep enough talent in the
| EU to train reasonably good models. The kernel is there, which
| seems like the attainable goal.
| qwytw wrote:
| >Mistral's models are pretty good, right
|
| Are they? IIRC their best model is still worse than the gpt-
| oss-120B?
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Devstral 2 should be above
| https://mistral.ai/news/devstral-2-vibe-cli
|
| Though I haven't checked other benchmarks and they only
| report swe
| acters wrote:
| Devstral 2 is free from the API. That has to be a bigger
| point to what makes it better. The price to performance
| ratio is practically better in every way. Does it matter
| if the performance is slightly worse when it is
| practically free?
| qwytw wrote:
| Yes, but if it's actually competitive that won't last
| that long. Mistral will do the same as google (cut their
| free tier by 50x or so) if they ever catch up.
| Financially anything else would make no sense.
|
| Of course currently Mistral has an insane free tier, 1
| billion tokens for each(?) of their models per month.
| tomalbrc wrote:
| Calling it oss is a farce
| menaerus wrote:
| They can't hire the best talent because the most experienced
| people will not leave their homes to chase a high-risk role
| with questionable remuneration by relocating their whole life
| to Paris or London.
|
| This goes to show how leaders in Mistral don't quite get that
| they are not special as they seem to think they are.
| Anthropic or OpenAI also require their talent to relocate but
| with stakes that are at least a high reward - $500k or $1M a
| year is a good start that is maybe worth investing into.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If somebody is in the EU already that calculation
| completely flips. We have a strong software startup
| industry in the US, would it really be that surprising if
| there was more unallocated talent in the EU, at this point?
| IMTDb wrote:
| > It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in
| Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are
|
| The EU is extremely invested in Mistral's development: half of
| the effort is finding ways to tax them (hello Zucman tax), the
| other half is wondering how to regulate them (hello AI act)
| District5524 wrote:
| Zucman taxes rich individuals (100mEUR+), not Mistral. AI Act
| rules are not that difficult to comply with by GPAI model
| providers as long as the model doesn't become systemic
| risk... They have to spend a lot more time on PR and
| handshaking with French politicians than on AI compliance.
| They probably don't even have a single FTE for that... So
| that's just prejudice I believe.
| lm28469 wrote:
| We're too busy with real life to bother with generating SVGs of
| pelicans on bicycles sorry, but feel free to dump billions on
| chatbots
| _menelaus wrote:
| Mistral is pursuing pursuing B2B use cases. Thats because
| they're releasing open models and the big thing about B2B is
| they HATE sending their data off-prem. OCR'ing and organizing
| old docs is a huge feature in B2B. Mistral's strategy seems
| smart to me.
| film42 wrote:
| Is open router still sending all OCR jobs to Mistral? I wonder if
| they're trying to keep that spot. Seems like Mistral and Google
| are the best at OCR right now, with Google leading Mistral by a
| fair bit.
| numlocked wrote:
| (I work at OpenRouter) If you send a PDF to our API we will:
|
| 1. Use native PDF parsing if the model supports it
|
| 2. Use this Mistral OCR model (we updated to this version
| yesterday)
|
| 3. UNLESS you override the "engine" param to use an alternate.
| We support a JS-based (non-LLM) parser as well [0]
|
| So yes, in practice a lot of OCR jobs go to Mistral, but not
| all of them.
|
| Would love to hear requests for other parsers if folks have
| them!
|
| [0]
| https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/multimodal/pdfs#p...
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| Chandra
| vikp wrote:
| Hey, I'm the founder of Datalab (we released Chandra OCR). I
| see someone requested it below - happy to help you all get
| setup. I'm vik@datalab.to
| siquick wrote:
| That links gives an error and so does
| https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/multimodal/pdfs
| hereme888 wrote:
| I'm reading worse performance than many OSS offerings like
| Paddle, MinerU, MonkeyOCR, etc:
|
| https://www.codesota.com/ocr
| nextworddev wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this site
| rafram wrote:
| Their handwriting benchmark is not useful. The test cases
| aren't even handwritten!
|
| https://www.codesota.com/ocr/best-for-handwriting
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Do you know of any good handwriting eval/benchmark? I haven't
| been able to find one.
| kwikiel wrote:
| That's just the illustration. But this is misleading - I will
| fix it asap and show real examples. I've run the mistral ocr
| on other benchmark
| vasco wrote:
| Gave it a birth registry from a Portuguese locality from 1755
| which my dad and I often decipher to figure out geneology and it
| did a terrible job.
|
| Regular Gemini Thinking can actually get 70-80% of the documents
| correct except lots of mistakes on given names. Chatgpt maybe
| understands like 50-60%.
|
| This Mistral model butchered the whole text, literally not a word
| was usable. To the point I think I'm doing something wrong.
|
| The test document: https://files.fm/u/3hduyg65a5
| zzleeper wrote:
| Oh god, I'm sure I wouldn't come close to 50%; that's so hard
| to read
| vasco wrote:
| It's tough but my dad is quite good at it. He has books of
| common abbreviations and agglutinations from different
| centuries. After you get used to it it's faster and very fun.
|
| We were mind blown how good Gemini was at it.
| ilamont wrote:
| I am too. Gemini 3.0 fast on old scrawled diary entries in
| English from 100+ years ago got them 95% right. It also
| added historical context when I prefaced the images with
| the identity of the writer, such as summaries of an old
| military unit history in Europe post-WW1 it got from a very
| obscure U.S. Army archive.
|
| Huge timesaver.
| observationist wrote:
| Just gave it a shot with Grok 4.1 thinking - do you have the
| ground truth translation to compare? I've tried 4 different
| times, with slight tweaks adding information from your
| description, and it's given me a range of interpretations. It'd
| be nice to see if any of them got close - a couple were more
| like pulpy telenovela plots, lol.
|
| The model might need tuning in order to be effective - this is
| normal for releases of image mode models, and after a couple
| days, there will be properly set up endpoints to test from, so
| it might be much better than you think. Or it could be really
| bad with turn of the 19th century portugese cursive.
| amelius wrote:
| Forgivable, as that's a quite atypical document, I'd say.
| vasco wrote:
| Not atypical enough for Gemini is my point. Also its one of
| the most common hand written document types in existance
| since at the time almost nobody other than the local priest
| knew how to write and birth and marriage certificates were
| probably the only written documents in whole towns and
| villages. This is the same throughout Europe at least.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Quick tip: when you digitize a page, put a sheet of black paper
| behind it. That keeps the ink on the other side from bleeding
| through.
| vasco wrote:
| You can tell that to the national archives!
| tecoholic wrote:
| > Mistral OCR 3 is ideal for both high-volume enterprise
| pipelines and interactive document workflows.
|
| I don't know how they can make this statement with 79% accuracy
| rate. For any serious use case, this is an unacceptable number.
|
| I work with scientific journals and issues like 2.9+0.5 and
| 29+0.5 is something we regularly run into that has us never being
| able to fully trust automated processes and require human
| verification every step.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Where are you seeing 79% accuracy? 79% only occurs on the page
| as a win rate, not an accuracy
| g947o wrote:
| And I believe the number is 74%, compared to OCR 2.
|
| What matters is whether this is better than
| competition/alternatives. Of course nobody is just going to
| take the output as is. If you do that, that's your problem.
| skygazer wrote:
| 79% win over OCR2 was just for English.
| tecoholic wrote:
| Right! I didn't know the difference. Does it mean for 79 out
| of 100 documents they produce 100% accurate OCR, I doubt it.
| The win rate sounds like a practical approximation of
| accuracy here to me.
|
| If I am wildly off, I am happy to learn.
| argsnd wrote:
| 79 out of 100 documents Mistral OCR 3 provides better
| output than Mistral OCR 2.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 79% of the time it beats the previous model.
|
| The previous version already achieved up to 99% accuracy in
| multiple benchmarks, already better than most OCR software.
| tecoholic wrote:
| Thank you.
| knrz wrote:
| Those are tricky! We've found https://www.datalab.to/ to be
| good for this @ thesynthesis.company
| GZGavinZhao wrote:
| Does it handle math expressions (those rendered from LaTeX) well?
| I've been looking for a good OCR model to transcribe my math
| textbooks into markdown (obviously ignoring the images and
| figures) with LaTeX as math expressions, and none of the current
| OCR models work reliably enough.
|
| EDIT: you can try it yourself for free at
| https://console.mistral.ai/build/document-ai/ocr-playground once
| you create a developer account! Fingers crossed to see how well
| it works for my use case.
| RagnarD wrote:
| Please post an update on how well it works for you.
| loaf_api wrote:
| I've just finished processing thousands of documents using the
| Gemini Pro 3 vision model and it outperformed every OCR and
| image model I've tested by a long shot, perfect markdown with
| latex for the math every time.
| pacman1337 wrote:
| what prompt are you using?
| lysecret wrote:
| 3 flash is also insanely good even slightly outperforms 3 pro
| for me.
| nerbert wrote:
| Just need to open the link to answer that question.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| No one mentioning the possibly most beautiful css effect on the
| Internet??
| jbk wrote:
| How so?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Not OS / free weights right?
| jesuslop wrote:
| I am testing it as a replacement of MathPix, first few tests look
| rather decent. In python for windows:
| https://pastebin.com/uyiFHKdJ (alpha version prototype). Launches
| windows snip tool, waits for clipboard image, calls Mistral,
| retrieves markdown and puts it as text in the clipboard, ready to
| be pasted in Typora, Obsidian, or other markdown editor.
| 7thpower wrote:
| My main beef with mistral is that they don't bother to respond to
| customer inquiries for products the hide behind "reach out for
| pricing" terms, so even if they were better than SoTA it wouldn't
| really matter.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| I absolutely loathe dealing with sales people.
|
| I will pay a premium for an inferior product or service if it
| means I don't have to deal with sales people.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Agreed. In this case the offering just fit neatly into a non
| core stack we had designed and displaced a bunch of stuff
| didn't want to build ourselves.
|
| I also hate dealing with sales people and am not going to
| reach out to them via another avenue as they will try and
| posture as if they're doing us a huge favor (in contrast to
| me begging gdb for gpt4 api access).
| temp0826 wrote:
| My current holy grail is my attempt to convert a Shipibo (an
| indigenous Peruvian language)-to-Spanish dictionary into a
| Shipibo-to-English dictionary. The pdf I have (available freely
| on archive.org) isn't a great scan (though I think it'd be a heck
| of a lot easier than some of the handwritten examples they show).
| Layout (2-columns) along with header/footers can cause some
| headaches, but it is all Latin script. This seems to fall on its
| face pretty badly (not even a couple of pages in), so my search
| continues. (The other major problem I'm having is trying to
| separate out Shipibo definitions/examples from the Spanish ones,
| and _only_ translating the Spanish to English...so pretty complex
| I guess. I 've been taking fresh stabs at this project every few
| months when I see OCR/LLM news pop up and continue to be
| disappointed)
| culi wrote:
| I'm assuming you're interested in studying Ayahuasca
| traditions?
|
| I recently learned that traditionally in Shipibo culture,
| ayahuasca was never meant to be given to "the normal mind".
| Instead the maestras would be the ones taking the ayahuasca in
| order to help guide them into diagnosing people dealing with
| various sicknesses.
|
| These maestras were also ranked by how many different plants
| they'd done a dieta on. A dieta is kinda similar to fasting.
| You can't shower with soap, you can't have sex, you can't have
| too much salt/seasoning, can't be exposed to too much smoke,
| can't have alcohol, etc. And you use that specific plant
| throughout your time. Basically you want to eliminate any
| conflicting variables so you can experience the plant as purely
| as possible to understand its effects. Traditionally these
| dietas could last over a year but modern day maestros typically
| do them for just a few weeks.
|
| I don't really have a point to this. Just found it fascinating
| how deeply and strictly they study certain plant medicines and
| wanted to share
| temp0826 wrote:
| Yes essentially. I've got a few resources cobbled together
| over the last few years but it'd be really nice to have this
| reference (my Spanish isn't the best, and running to the
| translator for a definition can be a little annoying). Also
| to share with fellow learners/apprentices I know. There are a
| couple of classes out there (which are actually geared more
| toward the ceremonial/icaro language, not purely
| conversational Shipibo, which is a bit simpler as you don't
| need to worry as much about conjugation and other
| complexities) which I might look into eventually.
|
| (Fwiw I've accumulated a couple years worth of dieta under my
| belt and am well aware of the restrictions! It's indeed very
| fascinating, been pretty serious about it the last few years
| and I've barely scratched the surface)
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Couldn't you use your smartphone and Google Lens (on
| Android, Google app on iOS includes Google Lens
| functionality) to translate the Spanish to English?
|
| FYI - Lens on Android does in-place language translation
| including attempting to use the same/similar font that the
| original language is written/printed.
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think Lens can be used in an
| automated batch translation mode to convert an entire
| book/multiple pages
| mkaic wrote:
| I suppose both of us watched the same Youtube video by Metta
| Beshay (i think that is his name?)
| temp0826 wrote:
| I actually did too lol. I was pleasantly surprised because
| it was actually decent and realistic about the situation (a
| lot of people get this romantic idea about going to the
| jungle to live and learn with the indigenous and have an
| "authentic" experience, and this does a pretty good job if
| dispelling that).
| knadh wrote:
| Once you have managed to get the data out and structured, you
| may want to check out dict.press. It's a dictionary publishing
| and management tool (which I maintain). Multiple widely used
| Indian dictionary projects run on it.
| temp0826 wrote:
| Will take a look, I assumed there'd be some tools along those
| lines, thanks for the suggestion
| b112 wrote:
| I applaud your efforts, but that seems difficult to me. There's
| so much nuance in language, and the original spanish
| translation would even be dependent upon locale-destination of
| the original dictionary. Which would also be time based, as
| language changes over time.
|
| And that translation is likely only a rough approximation, as
| words don't often translate directly. To add in an extra layer
| (spanish -> english) seems like another layer of imperfect (due
| to language) abstraction.
|
| Of course your efforts are targeting a niche, so likely people
| will understand the attempt and be thankful. I hope this
| suggestion isn't too forward, but this being an electronic
| version, you could allow some way for the original spanish to
| be shown if desired. That sort of functionality would be quite
| helpful, even non-native spanish speakers might get a clearer
| picture.
|
| What tools are you using to abstract all of this?
|
| If the spacing and columns of the images are consistent, I'd
| think imagemagick would allow you to automate extraction by
| column (eg, cutting the individual pages up), and OCR could
| then get to work.
|
| For the Shipibo side, I'd want to turn off all LLM
| interpretation. That tends to use known groupings of words to
| probabilistically determine best-match, and that'd wreak havoc
| in this case.
|
| Back to the images, once you have imagemagick chop and sort,
| writing a very short script to iterate over the pages, display
| them, and prompt with y/n would be a massive time saver. Doing
| so at each step would be helpful.
|
| For example, one step? Cut off header and footer, save to dir.
| Using helpful naming conventions (page-1, and
| page-1-noheader_footer). You could then use imagemagick to
| combine page-1 and -age-1-noheader_footer side by side.
|
| Now run a simple bash vet script. Each of 500 pages pops up,
| you instantly see the original and the cut result, and you hit
| y or n. One could go through 500 pages like this in 10 to 20
| minutes, and you'd be left with a small subset of pages that
| didn't get cut properly (extra large footer or whatever). If
| it's down to 10 pages or some such, that's an easy tweak and
| fix for those.
|
| Once done, you could do the same for column cuts. You'd already
| have all the scripts, so it's just tweaking.
|
| I'm mentioning all of this, because combo of automation plus
| human intervention is often the best method to something such
| as this.
|
| Anyhow, good luck!
| temp0826 wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestions, I do appreciate it. I was being
| pretty brief with my post but I really have spent a lot of
| time and tried this from a number of angles. I've had good
| luck with non-LLM tools to do the initial OCR, but it's not
| context aware especially about column/page breaks (like I
| mentioned it's kind of a dirty scan, and if the breaks happen
| on a Shipibo part it barfs a bit. Good for a rough search at
| least).
|
| I would _love_ to create a json version of it that would
| essentially have a bunch of fields for each word (Shipibo
| /Spanish/English word/definition/example, type of word, etc).
| It's further complicated by how words can be modified in
| Shipibo (it's actually a very technical language- words can
| have any number of prefixes and suffixes tagged on to change
| their meaning and their precision. In their "icaros", the
| healing songs they sing in ceremony, the most technical use
| of the language is considered to be the most beautiful.
| Essentially poetry from their "medical" jargon).
|
| I've done some human-in-the-loop attempts but still come up
| short in one way or another (I end up getting frustrated and
| throwing my hands up after seeing how much time I dump on
| it). So I figure this will remain a good test as the tools
| (and my prompting abilities) get better. It's definitely not
| urgent for me.
| speff wrote:
| This might be a good place to check the options available for OCR
| in-place translations. I took a look at OCR3, but it doesn't seem
| to support my use-case. It looks more tailored towards data
| extraction for further processing.
|
| I've got some foreign artbooks that I would like to get
| translated. The translations would need to be in place since the
| placement of the text relative to the pictures around it is
| fairly important. I took a look at some paid options online, but
| they seemed to choke - mostly because of the non-standard text
| placements and all.
|
| The best solution I could come up with is using Google Lens to
| overlay a translation while I go through the books, but holding a
| camera/tablet up to my screen isn't very comfortable. Chrome has
| Lens built in, but (IIRC) I still need to manually select
| sections for it to translate - it's not as easy to use as just
| holding my phone up.
|
| Anyone know of any progress towards in-place OCR/translations?
| claar wrote:
| If you don't mind a paid solution, try DEEPL. I also use Word's
| built in document translation to good effect.
| speff wrote:
| I don't mind paying for one, though I do remember trying
| DEEPL without much success. Can't remember the problem
| offhand, but one of the services I tried just gave me a
| generic error when I uploaded the PDF. My view at the time
| was that it had a conniption and just gave up.
|
| Wonder if Word uses the same system Edge has. I remember Edge
| was also good, but like Chrome's Lens, I'd need to highlight
| sections for it to get translated. Edge also OCR'd everything
| very well - just didn't do the translation part
| automatically.
| haraldooo wrote:
| I'm fairly confident this is solvable quite well with "just two
| api calls". Are examples of those books available online?
| speff wrote:
| Sure - there are some good examples in the product pictures
| for this book: https://www.amazon.com/hands-Takami-Kagami-
| teaches-power/dp/...
| constantinum wrote:
| At instances where data accuracy is of paramount importance, i
| think a hybrid route of non-llm ocr for data parsing and LLMs for
| structured data extraction is the safe passage to tread on. Seen
| better results for LLMWhisperer(OCR)[1] and Latest Gemini.
|
| [1] - https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/
| vintermann wrote:
| I appreciate having an OCR interface rather than having to chat
| with a bot, but unfortunately chatting with Gemini 3 gives far
| better results than this. I gave it the document Gemini 3 got a
| surprisingly good result on:
|
| https://urn.digitalarkivet.no/URN:NBN:no-a1450-rk10101508282...
|
| and the output wasn't even recognizably Danish.
|
| Just out of pity I gave it a birthday card from my sister written
| in very readable modern handwriting, and while in managed to make
| the contents of that readable, the errors it made reveals that it
| has very little contextual intelligence. Even if ! and ? can be
| hard to tell apart sometimes, they weren't here, and you do not
| usually start a birthday letter with "Happy Birthday brother?"
| suspended_state wrote:
| > got a surprisingly good result
|
| > the output wasn't even recognizably Danish
|
| How would you know that it's good then?
| kadoban wrote:
| I believe you misread. My reading is that Gemini 3 gave a
| good result on a certain input, so they gave the same input
| to this model and the result was poor.
| suspended_state wrote:
| You're correct.
| hoyd wrote:
| Voynich manuscript next :-)
| amelius wrote:
| Can we have an open source tool that uses the same API, and that
| you can just instruct to use Mistral or any other service if you
| think the open source tool has quality issues for a particular
| text?
|
| This makes more sense to me, as I find that FOSS OCR is quite
| okay for most usecases.
| i_am_not_groot wrote:
| Finally a way to read doctor's prescriptions
| jwr wrote:
| Sadly, only available through a hosted API. I don't see how this
| is useful for OCR, unless you are OK with uploading your
| confidential documents to "the cloud"?
|
| I'm still hoping for improved locally hosted models:
| qwen3-vl:30b-a3b-thinking-q4_K_M is already really good.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Businesses sign contracts about what happens when the data is
| uploaded. Ultimately your purpose is to make money more than
| maximally locking down your IP.
| Western0 wrote:
| I need solresol in any language. It are constructed for discusion
| and negotiation on war
| stri8ted wrote:
| What languages does it support? I can't find this info anywhere
| on the page.
| ethin wrote:
| So I tried this on the NVMe specification (I have a huge library
| of PDFs) and it worked decently, though the output had some
| oddities:
|
| - Parts of the table of contents were headings
|
| - I didn't like how tables were links to separate markdown files.
|
| In theory, I could recombine everything into one document, but
| that would require complicated Markdown parsing and manipulation
| and I wasn't even sure how to go about that given how free-form
| the resulting text was. I also haven't gone through the entire
| document (it's 784 pages) to check to make sure it's correct
| compared to what pdftotext or acrobat could create, so there's
| that too.
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