Reviews · Cloud document AI

Google Document AI review

Capable on print; a reading-order problem on handwritten prose.

Score
4.5/10
Accuracy
23.3% WER
Benchmark rank
#6 of 8
Price
From ~$1.50 per 1,000 pages (OCR)
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Google Document AI recorded 23.3% WER on our handwriting sample, the highest of the three big cloud providers. The individual character recognition was not dramatically worse than Azure or AWS, but it scrambled the reading order, interleaving lines from non-adjacent parts of the page.

That reading-order failure makes the raw error number understate how much repair the output needs, because fixing scrambled sequence is slower than fixing isolated word errors. It is a known pattern for engines built around structured forms when they meet free-flowing handwritten prose.

On printed documents inside Google Cloud it is a perfectly reasonable choice. On handwriting it is hard to recommend over the other two cloud options, let alone a specialist.

Verdict

Fine for printed text inside Google Cloud; the weakest of the big three on handwritten prose in our test.

Best for: GCP-based teams working with printed documents rather than handwriting.

See how Google Document AI compares in the full ranked table, or read our testing methodology.