Document Processing Workflow with Azure

In today’s digital age, document processing plays a crucial role in many business operations. However, manual extraction of information from documents can be time-consuming and prone to errors. This is where Azure Document Intelligence comes into play, providing an automated solution to streamline your document processing workflow.

Azure Document Intelligence

What is Azure Document Intelligence?

Azure Document Intelligence is an AI service that enables you to extract insights and information from documents. It offers capabilities such as text recognition, entity recognition, and key phrase extraction, allowing you to process and analyze documents at scale.

With Azure Document Intelligence, you can automate document processing tasks, extract valuable data from unstructured documents, and gain valuable insights from your documents.

Benefits of Azure Document Intelligence for Document Processing

  • Simple text extraction: Azure Document Intelligence uses advanced AI capabilities to extract text and structure from documents, eliminating the need for manual labeling and saving time and resources.
  • Customized results: The service can provide tailored results for different document layouts, ensuring accurate data extraction for invoices, contracts, forms, and other document types.
  • Flexible deployment: Azure Document Intelligence also offers flexible deployment options, allowing users to ingest data from the cloud or at the edge. This flexibility enables businesses to choose the most suitable approach for their specific needs, whether it’s a centralized cloud-based solution or a distributed edge deployment.
  • Built-in security: Moreover, it’s important to note that Azure Document Intelligence prioritizes the security of data and trained models. Microsoft is renowned for its commitment to cybersecurity and invests billions annually in research and development. Users can trust that their sensitive information and trained models are protected at all times.

Setting Up Azure Document Intelligence

Before we dive into the code, you’ll need an Azure subscription and an Azure Document Intelligence resource. You can create a new resource through the Azure portal and retrieve the necessary credentials for authentication.

Installing the Azure Document Intelligence SDK for Python

To get started, you’ll need to install the Azure Document Intelligence SDK for Python. You can do this using pip:

pip install azure-ai-documentintelligence

Extracting Text from Documents

Let’s start by extracting text from a document using Azure Document Intelligence. In this example, we’ll extract text from a sample invoice document.

Document Intelligence

Output

DocIntelligence

Explanation

This Python script leverages the Azure Document Intelligence API to analyze a PDF document. It starts by importing essential libraries and configuring the API client with the required endpoint and key. Next, it opens the PDF file for analysis. The analysis employs the prebuilt receipt model, and the results are stored in the `receipts` variable. The script proceeds to iterate over each document in `receipts`, displaying the type of each receipt, along with the values of the MerchantName and TransactionDate fields, along with their corresponding confidence scores.

You can explore more advanced features and capabilities of Azure Document Intelligence to further enhance your document processing workflows. Happy coding!

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