Extract form data in Document Intelligence Studio

Azure AI Document Intelligence is able to analyze and extract information from forms and documents, then identify field names and data.

How does Document Intelligence build upon optical character recognition (OCR)? While OCR can read printed or handwritten documents, OCR extracts text in an unstructured format which is difficult to store in a database or analyze. Document intelligence makes sense of the unstructured data by capturing the structure of the text, such as key/value pairs and information in tables.

In this exercise, you’ll take a look at a prebuilt model in Document Intelligence that is trained to recognize data for receipts.

NOTE Azure AI Document Intelligence is the new name for Azure Form Recognizer. You may still see Azure Form Recognizer in the Azure portal or Document Intelligence Studio.

Create Document Intelligence resource

You can use Azure AI Document Intelligence by creating either a Document Intelligence resource or an Azure AI services resource. In this exercise, you will create Document Intelligence resource, if you don’t already have one.

  1. In another browser tab, open Document Intelligence Studio, signing in with your Microsoft account.
  2. Select Settings and select the Resource tab. Select Create a new resource.
  3. On the Create resource dialog box, enter the following:
    • Subscription: Your Azure subscription.
    • Resource group: Select or create a resource group with a unique name.
    • New resource name: Enter a unique name.
    • Location: Select a region. If in eastern US, use “East US 2”.
    • Pricing tier: Free FO (if available, otherwise select Standard SO).

  4. Select Continue and then Finish. Wait for the resource to be deployed.

    Note If your resource is not yet displayed, you may need to Refresh the page.

Keep Document Intelligence Studio open.

Analyze a receipt in Document Intelligence Studio

You are now ready to analyze a receipt for the fictitious Northwind Traders retail company.

  1. Select https://aka.ms/mslearn-receipt to download a sample document to your computer. Open the folder.
  2. Select Document Intelligence Studio to return to the Get Started with Document Intelligence Studio page, and under Receipts select Try it out.
  3. In the Prebuilt drop-down list, make sure that Receipts is selected.

  4. Select Browse for files and navigate to the folder where you saved the picture. Select the picture of the receipt and then Open. The image appears on the left side of the screen.

    Screenshot of a northwind receipt.

  5. On the right, select Run analysis.
  6. When the analysis has run, the results are returned. Notice that the service has recognized specific data fields such as the merchant’s name, the address, phone number, and the transaction date and time, as well as the line items, subtotal, tax, and total amounts. Next to each field is a percentage probability that the field is correct.

In this exercise you have used the Document Intelligence Studio to create a Document Intelligence resource. You then used the service to analyze a receipt. From the results that were returned, you saw how Document Intelligence was able to identify specific fields, enabling data from everyday documents to be more easily processed. Before you close Document Intelligence Studio, why not try some of the sample receipts, including those in different languages?

Clean up

If you don’t intend to do more exercises, delete any resources that you no longer need. This avoids accruing any unnecessary costs.

  1. Open the Azure portal and select the resource group that contains the resource you created.
  2. Select the resource and select Delete and then Yes to confirm. The resource is then deleted.

Learn more

This exercise demonstrated only some of the capabilities of the AI Document Intelligence service. To learn more about what you can do with this service, see the Document Intelligence page.