Form Recogniser
The AI-powered document extraction service that understands your documents
Quickly extract text and structure from documents
Accelerate your business processes by automating information extraction. Form Recognizer applies advanced machine learning to accurately extract text, key/value pairs, and tables from documents. With just a few samples, Form Recognizer tailors its understanding to your documents, both on-premises and in the cloud. Turn documents into usable data at a fraction of the time and cost, so you can focus more time acting on the information rather than compiling it.
Simple extraction
Easily pull data and organize information with prebuilt and custom features – no manual labelling required.
Customised results
Get output tailored to your layouts with automatic custom extraction, and improve it with human feedback.
Flexible deployment
Ingest data from the cloud to the edge and apply to search indexes, business automation workflows and more.
Built-in security
Rely on enterprise-grade security and privacy applied to both your data and any trained models.
Easily extract text and structure with simple REST API
Accurately extract text, key/value pairs and tables from documents, forms, receipts and business cards without manual labelling by document type or intensive coding or maintenance. Utilise Form Recognizer’s Custom Forms, Pre-built and Layout APIs to extract information from your documents in an organised manner.
See it in action
Custom examples were extracted using a custom model trained with five PDF files of each form type
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Layout
Detects and extracts text and the layout of documents (e.g. tables, tick boxes, objects, etc.).
Learn morePre-built
These are pre-trained models for common scenarios that extract text, key value pairs and line items from documents.
Learn moreCustom
This custom service allows you to train on your own data to learn the structure of your documents in an intelligent way.
Learn more
Customise extraction to your forms
When you’re working with documents that deviate from traditional formats, such as industry-specific materials, you often need to build your own solution. The custom extraction capabilities in Form Recognizer help you overcome this challenge by training on your own data based on just five documents. Not only is the first output more reliable and tailored to your needs, but you can also provide human inputs to create a highly accurate model customised to your forms.

Apply Form Recognizer anywhere, from the cloud to the edge
Recognise forms on the edge, on-premises and in the cloud with container support in Azure Cognitive Services. The portable architecture can be deployed directly to Azure Kubernetes Service or Azure Container Instances, or to a Kubernetes cluster deployed to Azure Stack. Use the REST interface of the Form Recognizer API to then integrate into cognitive search indexes, automate business processes and create custom workflows for your business.
Learn moreAnalyse forms and documents
Make data-driven decisions by extracting data from tables and forms, and putting it into your data visualisation service for analysis.
Create intelligent search indexes
Easily find specific information in your documents and forms, such as total accounts payable, by integrating Form Recognizer with Azure Cognitive Search.
Automate business workflows
Extract text, key-value pairs and tables from forms and receipts, and pipe them into your back-end systems to perform tasks such as claim, invoice and receipt processing.
Privacy and security

- Form Recognizer keeps your data private. The custom training performed on your documents is not used by Microsoft to improve the Form Recognizer model.
- You control your data. Using containers, you choose where Form Recognizer processes your data – supporting consistency in hybrid environments across data, management, identity and security.
- Form Recognizer is part of Azure Cognitive Services, backed by Azure infrastructure and enterprise-grade security, availability, compliance and manageability.
Process documents cost effectively
Form Recognizer offers free and standard pricing options to extract valuable information from documents at a fraction of the price of manual extraction.
See Form Recognizer pricingGet started in three steps
Use simple REST API calls to extract the key/value pairs and tables from your forms.
Documentation and resources
Explore code samples
Take a look at our sample code
Customers using Form Recognizer to transform their documents
Zelros speeds up intake for faster customer service with Form Recognizer

Automation Anywhere uses Form Recognizer to support UK healthcare providers in processing clinical forms automatically and at scale

UiPath’s RPA platform is changing the game, processing large volumes of form-based content from oilfield partners.

Chevron is accelerating its access to consistent and reliable data with Form Recognizer.

Robotic process automation company Blue Prism saves customers millions of dollars with intelligent data extraction.

Learn how Financial Fabric created a software as a service (SaaS) solution using Form Recognizer to process financial transactions.

Frequently asked questions about Form Recogniser
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Form Recognizer, now in preview, is available in several Azure regions, with availability expanding in the near future.
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Form Recognizer supports printed and handwritten forms, PDFs and images.
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Form Recognizer is available in English, with additional language availability growing.
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The custom option uses five samples to learn the structure of your forms and intelligently extract text and data tailored to your documents. The pre-built option doesn’t use samples – the model has already been trained and is ready to use off the shelf to extract key fields from specific document types. The two pre-built APIs that are currently available are Pre-built Business Card and Pre-built Receipt.
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Layout extracts text using high-definition optical character recognition (OCR) tailored for documents. It also extracts the structures of tables (row and column numbers).