Optical character recognition or OCR software is a technology that identifies and recognizes text within scanned documents, photos, or images. It powers tools like PDF OCR Scanner that can extract data from PDFs or scanned documents by converting it into machine-readable text/data that can be edited, displayed, searched electronically, and stored more conveniently for further processing. With the increasing adoption of AI & machine learning, modern OCR software can automate end-to-end data capture workflows for a wide range of business documents, reducing manual entry, improving data accuracy, and accelerating workflows. Various OCR applications are available, including Google Document AI, IBM Watson Discovery, Azure AI Vision, Transkribus, Handwriting OCR, Amazon Textract, ABBYY FineReader, Nanonets, Rossum, Veryfi, Taggun, Ocrolus, Adobe Acrobat DC, and Tesseract OCR. Each software has its pros and cons, such as pricing structure, customizability, accuracy rates, and integration capabilities. To choose the best OCR software for your use case, it's essential to consider factors like data extraction, OCR features, integration with specific software, budget, and technical expertise required in-house. A benchmarking process involving a comprehensive sample dataset, human review, and confidence scores can help measure and compare the performance of different OCR applications.