Zerox – Document OCR with GPT-mini
This started out as a weekend hack with gpt-4-mini, using the very basic strategy of "just ask the ai to ocr the document". But this turned out to be better performing than our current implementation of Unstructured/Textract. At pretty much the same cost. I've tested almost every variant of document OCR over the past year, especially trying things like table / chart extraction. I've found the rules based extraction has always been lacking. Documents are meant to be a visual representation after all. With weird layouts, tables, charts, etc. Using a vision model just make sense! In…
In plain words
Zerox is a document OCR tool that uses GPT-4 mini's vision capabilities to extract text, tables, and charts from images and PDFs. It's designed for users who need accurate document processing and have found traditional rule-based extraction methods inadequate for complex layouts. The tool performs comparably to Unstructured and Textract at similar costs, using AI vision models to handle the visual nature of documents more effectively than conventional approaches.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
This started out as a weekend hack with gpt-4-mini, using the very basic strategy of "just ask the ai to ocr the document". But this turned out to be better performing than our current implementation of Unstructured/Textract. At pretty much the same cost. I've tested almost every variant of document OCR over the past year, especially trying things like table / chart extraction. I've found the rules based extraction has always been lacking. Documents are meant to be a visual representation after all. With weird layouts, tables, charts, etc. Using a vision model just make sense! In general, I'd categorize this solution as slow, expensive, and non deterministic. But 6 months ago it was impossible. And 6 months from now it'll be fast, cheap, and probably more reliable!
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