Text detection API showdown: Google vision vs Microsoft Vs Amazon

Detecting and reading text from photos has multiple use cases, be it clicking a picture of a printed text and automatically converting it into a digital file or the new age application of reading bills and invoices. Other interesting use cases include deep image search, understanding local business listing using street view images or when combined with text translation the ability to take a picture of a billboard in a foreign country and have it converted to your native language, the possibilities are limitless. Image text recognition is a class of computer vision problems which, among other things, includes OCR (optical character recognition) or text detection (used to find printed text on images) or handwritten text recognition. With the advancement of deep learning we have come a long way to get substantially better at text recognition, but still, the best companies in the business have much to cover before we can consider this problem as solved. Most of the major technology companies/cloud services provide APIs to recognize text in an image.