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Blogmarks tagged ocr, projects in 2024

Filters: Type: blogmark × Year: 2024 × ocr × projects × Sorted by date

Running prompts against images and PDFs with Google Gemini. New TIL. I've been experimenting with the Google Gemini APIs for running prompts against images and PDFs (in preparation for finally adding multi-modal support to LLM) - here are my notes on how to send images or PDF files to their API using curl and the base64 -i macOS command.

I figured out the curl incantation first and then got Claude to build me a Bash script that I can execute like this:

prompt-gemini 'extract text' example-handwriting.jpg

Animated terminal demo. At the top of the screen is a example-handwriting.jpg with some rough handwriting. I run this command in a terminal: prompt-gemini 'extract text' example-handwriting.jpg It returns JSON showing 270 tokens used by gemini-1.5-flash-8b. Then I run the command again with -r on the end and it returns the text from the image: Example handwriting Let's try this out

Playing with this is really fun. The Gemini models charge less than 1/10th of a cent per image, so it's really inexpensive to try them out.

# 23rd October 2024, 6:25 pm / bash, google, ocr, projects, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, llm, gemini, vision-llms, llm-pricing

textract-cli. This is my other OCR project from yesterday: I built the thinnest possible CLI wrapper around Amazon Textract, out of frustration at how hard that tool is to use on an ad-hoc basis.

It only works with JPEGs and PNGs (not PDFs) up to 5MB in size, reflecting limitations in Textract’s synchronous API: it can handle PDFs amazingly well but you have to upload them to an S3 bucket yet and I decided to keep the scope tight for the first version of this tool.

Assuming you’ve configured AWS credentials already, this is all you need to know:

pipx install textract-cli
textract-cli image.jpeg > output.txt

# 30th March 2024, 7:01 pm / aws, cli, ocr, projects

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