Today we are announcing a new Amazon Comprehend feature for intelligent document processing (IDP). This feature allows you to classify and extract entities from PDF documents, Microsoft Word files, and images directly from Amazon Comprehend without you needing to extract the text first.
Many customers need to process documents that have a semi-structured format, like images of receipts that were scanned or tax statements in PDF format. Until today, those customers first needed to preprocess those documents to flatten them into machine-readable text, which can reduce the quality of the document context. Then they could use Amazon Comprehend to classify and extract entities from those preprocessed files.
Now with Amazon Comprehend for IDP, customers can process their semi-structured documents, such as PDFs, docx, PNG, JPG, or TIFF images, as well as plain-text documents, with a single API call. This new feature combines OCR and Amazon Comprehend’s existing natural language processing
