Mistral adds a new API that turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file

On Thursday French large language model (LLM) developer Mistral launched a new API for developers who handle complex PDF documents. Mistral OCR is an optical character recognition (OCR) API that can turn any PDF into a text file to make it easier for AI models to ingest. LLMs which underpin popular GenAI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT work particularly well with raw text. So companies that want to create their own AI workflow know that it has become extremely important to store and index data in a clean format so that this data can be reused for AI processing. Unlike most OCR APIs, Mistral OCR is a multimodal API, meaning that it can detect when there are illustrations and photos intertwined with blocks of text. The OCR API creates bounding boxes around these graphical elements and includes them in the output. Mistral OCR also doesn’t just output a big wall of text; the output is formatted in Markdown, a formatting syntax that developers use to add links, headers, and other formatting ... Read full article.