How to Extract Handwritten & Printed Text Accurately with DEEPREAD Free Form: Part 1

DoubleYard
5 min readApr 8, 2022

Text extraction may seem to be a staple in day to day business processes, however, it does comes with its own set of challenges and limitations. For one, handwritten text extraction have been notoriously difficult to extract due to the unique styles of each individual and most brands have stayed away from offering handwritten text extraction with their OCR products.

Don’t fret! We have great news!

DoubleYard’s DEEPREAD Free Form (DRFF) is now integrated with RapidAPI and we can’t wait to showcase how DEEPREAD can help you with your text extraction needs. In this article, we will uncover what is and how to kick off your journey in extracting handwritten and printed text accurately using RapidAPI.

What is DRFF?

DRFF is a text extraction solution designed for unstructured documents such as letters, emails, health records and even legal contracts (just to name a few) which can accurately extract both handwritten and printed texts. By capturing the whole document, you can easily search and index your data based on your organizational or personal preferences!

At the time of writing this, DRFF supports over 10 widely-used languages and should you require additional languages, just let us know!

What is RapidAPI?

RapidAPI is a next generation API platform that was founded by Iddo Gino (you can read more about him here) in 2016 with over 35,000 APIs currently available in its marketplace, with over 3 million developers signed up on the API Marketplace.

To quote RapidAPI:

Find the APIs that you need for your project, embed the API into your app, and track usage of all your APIs through a single dashboard. If you create an API, use RapidAPI to make it available to over three million developers already using the RapidAPI Hub.

Source: https://docs.rapidapi.com/docs/what-is-rapidapi

How do I get started?

The first thing to do, if you don’t have it already is to create your RapidAPI user account. Once that is done, navigate to the DEEPREAD Free Form page and click on the “Test Endpoint” button as shown below in the middle column.

API Subscription Page

Here, you may be prompted to subscribe to the API as shown below. Select the best plan for your document processing needs.

DRFF Pricing Plan

Click on the “Subscribe” button to activate your plan. Once subscribed, a success message will appear.

API Subscription Success

For any additional documentation on the API, you can visit: https://rapidapi.com/doubleyard-inc-doubleyard-inc-default/api/deepread-free-form-ai-ocr/ for more details.

Navigate back to the “Endpoints” tab on the API menu to start testing!

Test Endpoints Page

Playing Around With The API

On the “Endpoints” tab, there are three main components to testing the API which are summarised below.

  • Endpoints — Here, you can see the endpoints supported. With DEEPREAD Free Form, we only have the Full Page AI OCR option to support the POST request after uploading the input file for processing.
  • Documentation — Using the middle column, you can view and change all the necessary details required to test the endpoint. For example, you can pass values (Document Language, Input File, RapidAPI App, etc) in the different parameters in the documentation section. We suggest that you only upload the recommended source files as described below.
File Upload Section
  • Code — Once you have run a test, you can copy-paste the code directly from here. RapidAPI supports 20 programming languages with 40 different libraries to make your integration journey as easy as pie.

Once you have passed all the necessary parameters, you are all set to click on the “Test Endpoint” button.

Test Endpoint Location

After clicking the “Test Endpoint” button, you will see the output of the test in the “Results” section.

The below sample shows a test being ran successfully. For more information on the output results, click on the “metadata” dropdown section, or alternatively, check out the second part of our article on RapidAPI, coming very soon!

Test Ran Successfully

Any errors that may occur when running the test will be displayed with a red flag (as shown below) and a descriptor of the error occurred.

Sample Error Message

That’s all folks, that is the end of Part 1 of “How to Extract Handwritten & Printed Text Accurately with DEEPREAD Free Form”. For more information on sample use cases and testing out our easy to use output visualizer, check out part 2!

Toodle-loos!

For support and additional guidance, drop us a line on support@deepread.ai at any time!

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