Mistral AI Launches OCR API, Beats Azure OCR, Google Gemini...
French AI company Mistral AI has unveiled Mistral OCR, a powerful new API for Optical Character Recognition that boosts document analysis. The tool processes images and PDFs, accurately pulling out structured text, media, tables, and equations.
Revolutionizing Document Understanding
Approximately 90% of the world’s organizational data is stored as documents, and to harness this potential, Mistral AI introduces Mistral OCR. The API integrates with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, making it suitable for processing multimodal documents such as slides and complex PDFs.
Mistral OCR is now the default model for document understanding on Le Chat and is available via the API ‘mistral-ocr-latest’ at 1000 pages per dollar, with batch inference doubling efficiency. The API is accessible on Mistral’s developer suite, La Plateforme, and will soon be available through cloud, inference partners, and on-premises deployment.
Outperforming the Competition
Mistral OCR supports multilingual and multimodal content, outperforming leading OCR models in benchmarks. It has been tested against Google Document AI, Azure OCR, Gemini models, and GPT-4o, scoring 94.89 overall, with high performance in mathematical expressions, scanned documents, and tables. The versatility of Mistral OCR allows it to handle a diverse range of scripts, fonts, and languages.
The API processes up to 2000 pages per minute on a single node and supports “doc-as-prompt” functionality, allowing structured output extraction in formats like JSON, enabling seamless integration with downstream workflows.
Applications and Use Cases
Beta customers are leveraging Mistral OCR for scientific research, historical preservation, customer service, and technical literature indexing. Research institutions use it to convert academic papers into AI-ready formats, heritage organizations are digitizing historical records, and customer service teams are transforming manuals into searchable knowledge bases.
For enterprises with sensitive data, Mistral AI offers a self-hosted deployment option, providing organizations with strict data privacy requirements full control over their infrastructure.
Future Enhancements
Mistral AI plans to further enhance the model and expand on-premises deployment in the coming weeks, solidifying its position as a leader in OCR technology.
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