[VeejayRampay]

which solutions would you classify as "modern OCR"

are we talking tesseract or something?

[criddell]

Probably something like Apple Vision Framework or Amazon Textract or Google's Cloud Vision.

Tesseract does well under ideal conditions, but the world is messy.

[cratermoon]

I was thinking ABBYY FineReader, but those, too. Instead of using VLMs or any sort of generative AI, they're build on good old-fashioned feature extraction and nearest neighbor classifiers such as the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. It's possible to build a working prototype of this technique using basic ML algorithms.