Amazon Textract is a machine learning (ML) service that makes it easy to extract text and data from scanned documents. Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. This allows you to use Amazon Textract to instantly "read" virtually any type of document and accurately extract text and data without needing any manual effort or custom code. Amazon Textract has multiple applications in a variety of fields. For example, talent management companies can use Amazon Textract to automate the process of extracting a candidate's skill set.

Organizations in all industries have a large number of physical documents. It can be difficult to extract text from a scanned document when it contains formats such as tables, forms, paragraphs, and check boxes. Organizations have been addressing these problems with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, but it requires templates for form extraction and custom workflows. Extracting and analyzing text from images or PDFs is a classic machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) problem. When extracting the content from a document, you want to maintain the overall context and store the information in a readable and searchable format.