96 pointsby bilatera day ago22 comments
  • sbarrea day ago
    I find it challenging to accept something that talks about "OCR" but then I upload a PDF with text in images, and when I query the document after upload, I get a message that says "I can't interpret images"..

    Then are you actually doing OCR, or are you just extracting embedded text?

    • 0x62a day ago
      I’d imagine their capabilities mirror that of Mistral OCR [1]. Mistral outputs markdown, the image would have to be convertible to a reasonably useful markdown structure (charts, tables etc).

      [1] https://mistral.ai/en/news/mistral-ocr

      • themanmarana day ago
        This highlights the biggest issue I've found with Mistral OCR. Many of the documents I upload are entirely classified as images, which means no OCR is being run.

        Pretty much anything with a different colored background gets returned as (image)[image_001].

        Example: https://omni-demo-data.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/test/17398...

        • mtillmana day ago
          LLMs tend to be a hammer in search of a nail when it comes to documents that have imagery. We decided on CV models which results in a high 90s midpoint for the docs our customers care about. If you can afford to go with a cv pipeline, it can outperform all of the LLMs by some margin.
      • bilatera day ago
        Yes - unfortunately it seems they don't read images in the pdf.
    • tmpz22a day ago
      Same vein - YouTube most (all?) llm integrations just scrape the transcript. I -think- google's aistudio does more but I'm unsure.

      I mean I get it bulk video processing would be crazy expensive, but at least mention you're only analyzing the transcript especially if you're a paid product.

      • wildzzza day ago
        Whisper does do text to speech but yes, nearly all just read off the subtitles. There's a video by f4mi on YouTube where she tricked the summarizing bots with off-screen captions filled with nonsense.
    • a day ago
      undefined
  • setnonea day ago
    Sweet branding! Grandma told me she's not happy with lack of privacy policy.
  • simonwa day ago
    I built a CLI tool for experimenting with Mistral OCR here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/7/mistral-ocr/

    Honestly, the vibes aren't great. Gemini is a lot more flexible for handling PDFs - you can prompt it to do a bunch of other things - and Mistral OCR appears to hallucinate if it can't correctly read handwriting, a common problem with vision LLM based OCR tools.

    The way Mistral OCR handles images within the text is disappointing - it doesn't attempt to interpret them, just extracts them out as binary blobs. A vision LLM can usually do a great job of describing an image, but with Mistral OCR you have to manually run that as a separate step.

    • brianjkinga day ago
      Knowing that you have to do that as a separate step adds a whole additional level of complexity too.

      For example, if some content has the images and some don't, you need to add whole additional steps to your processing and potentially add hallucinations in.

      What are you using for document extraction lately, Simon?

      • simonw17 hours ago
        I'm really impressed with Gemini - Gemini 2.0 Pro Exp seems remarkably good at even really complex scrappy documents.
    • bilatera day ago
      Agreed - I am surprised they did are not using Pixtral to read images as well.
  • bilatera day ago
    OK I've been critical of Mistral AI but credit where credit is due. Mistral OCR seems cool.

    So cool in fact, I got distracted and ended up building an open source PDF parser and chat app!

    Presenting Auntie PDF - your all-knowing guide that unpacks every PDF into clear, actionable insights.

    You can upload a pdf or point to a public link, parse it, and then ask questions. All open source and free.

    • onebitwisea day ago
      Lovely idea.

      Not working for me on a file like this: https://files.catbox.moe/gii0pu.pdf It says that is larger than 10MB (it's 7MB), or failed on url.

      • bilater13 hours ago
        thanks. yeah there is an annoying limit on vercel's end for body size of 4.5 mb. there are solutions to get around it by uploading directly to a storage solution but i wanted to keep the app simple for folks who want to dive into the code.
    • poguea day ago
      That's pretty impressive for a project just released yesterday. I wish I had the energy and wherewithal to put stuff together that fast.
      • bilatera day ago
        Thanks! Cursor definitely helps me speed things up haha.
  • daft_pink7 hours ago
    Is there a way to use mistral ocr on us servers so your data never leaves our borders?
  • jbaudanzaa day ago
    I have a question about Mistral OCR. If I give the model a PDF that is 90% text, is it actually performing OCR on an image representation of the text? Or is it smart enough to extract the text directly and only use OCR on images?
  • foundzena day ago
    Love the creativity in the branding but it did not work in my case either. Gibberish raw content and error in answering any question.
  • t-3a day ago
    What are people using these OCR programs for? Are there really that many PDFs being made without embedded text these days?
    • qingcharlesa day ago
      I have a million+ scanned PDF documents going back 300 years that are mostly just images of text.
  • a day ago
    undefined
  • elanninga day ago
    It looks great, nice work. I’m impressed at the quick development too.
  • JoelJacobsona day ago
    Thanks for creating, really useful!

    Would be nice with a [Download Combined Rendered] button to download a self-contained .html web page of the rendered combined page.

  • shnplna day ago
    I would like it if my chat session did not clear if go to Document Content and back to chat. Or I wish I could see my document when chatting.
  • a day ago
    undefined
  • mjyoona day ago
    Unfortunate that Mistral OCR can't tell me details presented in charts and graphs.
  • yannisa day ago
    Pretty impressive and did a good job for an academic pdf I uploaded. Nice UI also.
  • ab_testinga day ago
    This is amazing. Could you share the prompts that were used for this product ?
    • bilatera day ago
      its not something you build with just a prompt. at least not yet.
  • triyambakama day ago
    The coolest thing about this is the short and easy to pronounce .com
    • bilater16 hours ago
      haha yes I was very happy to get the domain
  • n8m8a day ago
    im on mobile and don’t have a pdf to test it with, but I love your styling and text copy.
  • what about privacy?
  • eastoeasta day ago
    Awesome UI!
  • a day ago
    undefined
  • haker_xa day ago
    [flagged]