Take your favorite OCR software.

Then take a photo of a document and throw it into ChatGPT, or Gemini, along with the word "Transcribe".

ChatGPT wins, by a landslide. BUT AI's advantage doesn't stop there.

"Take this picture of some idiot filling in form 49, I've also attached the PDF, fill in the PDF fields, provide a database record according to the schema attached and flag if there are any obvious problems with the entries".

That works too. "Produce a latex document of this kid's math homework and flag any problems" - works. "Produce a MS word document of this letter" - works. "Read this bill and produce a JSON version following the schema from this example" ... and so on and so forth.

More than that, it is starting to work pretty well with Gemma 31B local model (will still do 30 document analyses on cpu only, at Q4 on a DDR4 or higher machine. Yes it's mostly memory speed that matters) at this point. I mean, that's GPT 5.0 or so quality (95% correct with the occasional problem), but hey, Qwen 3.8 27B may be coming out next week ...