On: Replace OCR with Vision Language Models

[egorfine]

I had a need to scan serial numbers from Apple's product boxes out of pictures taken by a clueless person on their phone. All OCR tools failed.

Vision model did the trick so well it's not even funny to discuss anything further.

"This is a picture of Apple product box. Find and return only the serial number of the product as found on a label. Return 'none' if no serial number can be found".

[ptx → egorfine]

Did you check if all the numbers were correct?

[egorfine → ptx]

Of course. There was a little piece of code to query Apple for S/N data and it validated whether it was correct.