My main question really is: what are practical OCR tools that I can string together on my MacBook Pro M1 Max w/ 64GB Ram to maximize OCR quality for lots of mail and schoolwork coming into my house, all mostly in English.
I use ScanSnap Manager with its built in OCR tools, but that's probably super outdated by now. Apple Vision does way better job than that. I heard people say also that Apple Vision is better than Tesseract. But is there something better still that's also practical to run in a scripted environment on my machine?
It does not provide bounding boxes but you can get text.
And yes, Ansible (among other tools) can be used to manage macOS.
This discussion doesn’t seem productive. You have a preconceived view point, and you’re not actually considering the problem or even doing 5 seconds of googling.
Managing a Mac fleet on AWS isn’t a real problem. If Apple’s OCR framework were significantly above the competition, it could easily be used. I would like to see benchmarks of it, as the other person was also asking for.
My point is, I don’t think any comparative benchmark would ever exclude something based on “oh it’s just 10%, who cares.” I think the issue is more that Apple Vision Framework is not well known as an OCR option, but maybe it’s starting to change.
And another part of the irony is that Apple’s framework probably gets way more real world usage in practice than most of the tools in that benchmark.
So I'm not saying it should be excluded because it's can only used by relatively few people, but I was trying to communicate that I kind of get why not so many people care about it and why it gets forgotten, since most people wouldn't be able to run it even if they wanted to.
Instead, something like DeepSeek OCR could be deployed on any of the three major OSes (assuming there is implementations of the architecture available), so of course it gets a lot more attention and will be included in way more benchmarks.