AI OCR & ExtractionExtract text from any image or document
The Helix AI OCR API extracts text from images and scanned documents in 100+ languages. It combines Tesseract OCR with HuggingFace TrOCR fallback for handwriting, supports structured output with bounding boxes, and handles receipts, invoices, business cards, and license plates.
- Free tier with 100 requests/month
- Fast, cached responses
- 99.9% uptime target
- Standard REST + JSON
What is the AI OCR & Extraction API?
The Helix AI OCR API extracts text from images and scanned documents in 100+ languages. It combines Tesseract OCR with HuggingFace TrOCR fallback for handwriting, supports structured output with bounding boxes, and handles receipts, invoices, business cards, and license plates.
How it works
- 1POST an image URL or upload a file to /extract — receive the plain text.
- 2POST to /extract/structured for bounding boxes around each word/line/block.
- 3Specify `lang` (eng, fra, deu, spa, chi_sim, etc.) — 100+ languages.
- 4Handwriting? Pass `model=trocr` to use the HuggingFace TrOCR model.
- 5Tables and forms are detected automatically — output includes a `tables` array.
Endpoints
3 REST endpoints, all returning consistent JSON.
/extractExtract text from image URL or upload
/extract/structuredExtract with bounding boxes
/languagesList supported languages
Code in 5 languages
Copy and paste into your project. Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your RapidAPI key.
// AI OCR & Extraction API
const response = await fetch(
"https://ai-ocr-by-helix-api.p.rapidapi.com/extract",
{
method: "POST",
headers: {
"X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
"X-RapidAPI-Host": "ai-ocr-by-helix-api.p.rapidapi.com",
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({ "query": "your input" })
}
);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);What developers build with this API
Real use cases from production deployments.
Receipt Scanning for Expense Apps
Build a Concur/Expensify alternative. Users snap a photo, your app extracts vendor, amount, date, and line items in <2 seconds.
Business Card Capture
Scan a card at a trade show → auto-populate your CRM with name, title, company, email, phone. No more typing.
Invoice Processing
Pipe scanned PDFs through OCR → extract structured invoice data → push to QuickBooks or Xero. Automate accounts payable end-to-end.
License Plate Recognition
Parking lots, drive-throughs, and fleet management. The API is fast enough for real-time ALPR at 5 FPS.
Document Digitization
Convert paper archives to searchable text. Combine with our Embeddings API for semantic search over decades of old documents.
Pricing
All tiers include this API. No credit card for free tier.
BASIC
Free
- ✓ 100 reqs/month
- ✓ Hard limit
- ✓ All endpoints
PRO
$9.99/mo
- ✓ 10,000/month
- ✓ +$0.005 each
- ✓ All endpoints
ULTRA
$29.99/mo
- ✓ 100,000/month
- ✓ +$0.002 each
- ✓ All endpoints
MEGA
$99.99/mo
- ✓ 1,000,000/month
- ✓ +$0.001 each
- ✓ All endpoints
Frequently asked questions
Real answers to questions developers ask before integrating.