April 17, 2025
4 min read

Unlock the Power of OCR with FriendliAI

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is transforming how businesses manage documents by converting images, PDFs, and even handwritten notes into actionable data. Whether you're processing invoices, verifying IDs, or digitizing paper archives, OCR accelerates workflows and reduces human error.

FriendliAI brings OCR technology to the forefront, enabling you to fine-tune, deploy, scale, and compare powerful models—all from one seamless platform.

In this blog, we’ll explore how FriendliAI enhances document workflows with cutting-edge OCR capabilities, making document processing faster, more efficient, and more accessible than ever.

Why OCR Matters: Transforming Workflows

Modern enterprises handle thousands of documents daily. Manual data entry is time-consuming, error-prone, and costly—leading to delays, compliance risks, and operational bottlenecks.

OCR addresses these challenges by automating text extraction from images, PDFs, and scanned documents. It bridges the gap between unstructured visual content and structured data, empowering faster decision-making across industries like finance, healthcare, logistics, and law.

Key Benefits of OCR in Workflows:

Automated Document Processing: Extract and process text from contracts, invoices, and forms in a fraction of the time.
Reduced Manual Labor: Eliminate tedious and repetitive data entry tasks.
Scalable Operations: Process increasing document volumes without bottlenecks.
Compliance & Governance: Ensure secure handling of sensitive documents with full traceability.
End-to-End Digitization: Convert paper records into searchable digital archives.

Looking for high-performance OCR models? These trending models on Hugging Face can be deployed instantly to FriendliAI in just a few clicks:

meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct: Meta’s new multimodal model with 10M context length, strong reasoning and coding skills.
google/gemma-3-27b-it: Google’s 27B multimodal model with 128K context, multilingual and strong reasoning.
reducto/RolmOCR: OCR model for extracting text from images or documents.
allenai/olmOCR-7B-0225-preview: 7B OCR model for accurate text extraction from images.
openbmb/MiniCPM-o-2_6: Compact language model for efficient text understanding.
OpenGVLab/InternVL3-14B: 14B parameter vision-language model excelling in image-text tasks and multimodal understanding.
ds4sd/SmolDocling-256M-preview: Lightweight 256M parameter model for document understanding.

These models tackle a variety of OCR challenges, from document layout analysis to multilingual text detection. Try them out to streamline your extraction pipelines and boost document understanding.

Get Started in Just a Few Steps

FriendliAI makes it easy to deploy, evaluate, and scale AI models—bringing powerful AI technology to your entire team, no matter the size.

Head to a model page on Hugging Face.
Select “Friendli Endpoints” from the Deploy tab.

Figure 1: Deploying from Hugging Face.

Click “Deploy now” to create Friendli Dedicated Endpoints.

🎉 That’s it—you’re ready to go! For more, check out our previous blog on how to deploy multimodal models from Hugging Face to FriendliAI.

Compare OCR Models in Playground

Need to evaluate multiple OCR models side by side? Use the Friendli Playground to test and compare models in real time.

Start by heading to the Playground.

Figure 2: Playground.

Figure 3: Prompting to a model.

Click “Select Model” to choose up to 4 models.

Figure 3: Selecting 4 models.

Prompt models with the same input and compare results for latency, accuracy, and output quality.

Figure 4: Comparing outputs.

It’s the fastest way to find the best OCR model for your needs—based on your own data.

FriendliAI: Feature-Packed Platform for Every Need

FriendliAI combines state-of-the-art performance with an intuitive interface, making deploying and managing AI models not only simple but also highly efficient.

FriendliAI’s platform is engineered to be both developer-friendly and business-ready. It empowers teams to experiment simply with cutting-edge AI models, deploy, and scale without the complexities of managing infrastructure. Whether you’re fine-tuning custom models or performing mass document processing for your enterprise, FriendliAI provides the tools to deploy and manage AI models with confidence.

AI Experiments Made Simple With a comprehensive suite of capabilities, FriendliAI offers everything you need to build, deploy, and scale AI models easily and efficiently.

Experiment Simply with Cutting-Edge Models: Deploy and compare a wide variety of AI models—including custom fine-tuned ones—directly from Hugging Face with a single click. Effortlessly test, iterate, and find the best fit for your use case.
Lightning Speed: Achieve near-instant results with ultra-low latency and blazing fast token processing (TTFT & TPOT), enabling real-time applications and responsive AI experiences.
Effortless Scalability: Scale from small workloads to millions of requests seamlessly, thanks to FriendliAI’s elastic infrastructure that automatically adapts to fluctuating demand.
Reliable Performance: Built on enterprise-grade infrastructure, FriendliAI ensures high availability and minimal downtime—even during peak loads.
Built-In Observability: Gain real-time insights into performance and usage metrics through our bespoke monitoring plane.