I trialed Aleph recently and was impressed by its progress against an ambitious goal. My impressions as a user were as follows:

1. Aleph is excellent out-of-the-box for its

– OCR, via Tesseract or Google’s Vision API

– Full text search, via Elasticsearch

– Browser based UI, via React

2. Aleph does a okay job but has room for improvement with

– Entity extraction

– Language detection

where “okay” means it’s accurate enough to be useful for filtering by names, emails, languages, etc., but you’ll probably encounter occasional errors.

I also noticed search latency in my deployment and would love to try the Elasticsearch tips from the HN thread last week [1]. This latency does not appear in the production deployment by the Aleph team.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22396918

Again, props to the Aleph team for their success so far.