I’m new to the OCR space. Given the the successes in self-driving (given no systems are production ready, Waymo and Tesla have MVPs), what makes reading text so hard that cloud providers struggle to have human-level accuracies?
Same problems as with self-driving cars and speech recognition: it's very very hard (if not impossible) for software to parse the universe of scenarios. Said another way, it's never accurate enough to "work" when it's trained on the outside world. Usable output requires the kind of accuracy you only get when the process is trained in controlled environments (limited "vocabulary": fonts, layouts, languages, words, accents, geography, etc.).
Many fonts, characters, languages and low quality scans.