Is OCR Dead? How Vision AI Is Redefining Text Extraction

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Jan 2, 2026 · 20m

For decades, Optical Character Recognition was the "90% solved" problem that caused 100% of the headaches for developers and businesses. From the brittle pattern-matching of the 1970s to the manual correction workflows of the early 2000s, extracting text from messy documents was a notoriously unreliable process. In this episode, Herman and Corn dive into the "Transformer Revolution" and the rise of multimodal Vision Language Models (VLMs) like Gemini and Qwen. They discuss whether specialized OCR APIs are becoming obsolete, how AI handles complex scripts like Hebrew, and the dangerous new…