AWS Textract

· #260 most-used

Read any document. Extract every fact. Act instantly.

DocumentsStorageAnalyticsFinanceDeveloperAIFormsAutomation

AWS Textract is Amazon's ML-powered document intelligence service that goes far beyond OCR — it reads handwritten notes, scanned forms, multi-column tables, receipts, identity cards, and mortgage packages, returning structured data instead of a wall of text. Connect it to Actionist and your agents can extract form fields from incoming contracts, pull line items from vendor invoices, verify signatures on executed documents, analyse lending packages overnight, and route every result to the right system without a human touching the PDF.

Average time saved
11 hours
per person · per month
≈ 1 workdays back

Eliminates manual work. Agents eliminate the manual data entry required when humans transcribe text, form fields, and table values from scanned or photographed documents into downstream systems.

Schedule

What your AWS Textract agent runs on autopilot

A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.

28Scheduled jobs
7Agents at work
24/7Always on
Agents
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Multi-app workflows

AWS Textract × every other app you use

End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.

6Workflows
9Apps spanned
~71 hrsSaved / week
6Personas served
For customer success
Featured4 apps

Invoice-to-case in 60 seconds

When a customer emails a disputed invoice to the support inbox, your agent grabs the attachment, runs Analyze Receipt or Invoice to extract the vendor, line items, and total, then opens a pre-populated support case with the key figures already filled in — and posts a Slack alert to the assigned CSM with the extracted amount and a calendar invite for a resolution call. The customer gets an acknowledgement within the minute; the CSM walks into the call already briefed.

~12 hrs

Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot

The flow
Trigger·When a customer email with a PDF invoice attachment arrives in the support inbox
Result
Detect signatures to confirm document authenticityNotify CSM with extracted invoice summary and case linkCreate resolution call on CSM calendar with invoice context
The win
Saved per run
18 min
Runs / week
~40×
Zero manual invoice transcription
Driven byCustomer Support Agent
ROI

Savings

What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.

Without Actionist

What you do manually today

With Actionist

What your agent runs for you

  • Sales
    19 min / week
    Manual contract entry

    A rep spends ~20 minutes transcribing key dates, values, and parties from each signed paper contract into the CRM before the deal can be marked Closed Won.

    Sales Agent
    0 min
    Agent reads and files the contract

    The agent extracts contract value, renewal date, and signatory names via Textract the moment the PDF lands, and updates the CRM record and calendar reminder before the rep closes the email.

  • Marketing
    14 min / week
    Conference card transcription

    After each event, a marketing coordinator manually types handwritten interest cards from booth visitors into the lead database — a slow, error-prone task that delays follow-up by days.

    Marketing Agent
    0 min
    Agent extracts and enriches leads

    The agent runs Detect document text on scanned cards, maps the extracted name, company, and interest fields directly to HubSpot contacts, and triggers the nurture sequence before the team flies home.

  • Customer Support
    19 min / week
    Invoice dispute keying

    Support reps manually read and re-type customer-submitted invoice PDFs to open dispute tickets, introducing transcription errors and adding 15+ minutes per case.

    Customer Support Agent
    0 min
    Agent pre-populates every case

    The agent extracts vendor, line items, and total from the attached invoice via Analyze Receipt or Invoice and pre-fills the dispute case — the rep reviews, not types.

  • Human Resources
    8 min / week
    ID document data entry

    HR coordinators manually copy name, date of birth, and document number from new hire ID uploads into the HRIS to complete right-to-work verification.

    Human Resources Agent
    0 min
    Agent handles ID verification

    The agent extracts every field from the uploaded ID via Extract identity document data, confirms the document is not expired, and logs the verification with a timestamp — audit-ready in seconds.

  • Finance
    14 min / week
    Receipt-to-ledger transcription

    AP analysts manually key vendor name, amount, and line items from scanned receipts and invoices into the accounting system — a bottleneck that stretches month-end close by two full days.

    Finance Agent
    0 min
    Agent processes the receipt batch

    The agent submits all receipts for async expense analysis, retrieves structured vendor and amount data for each, and writes records to the accounting system — the analyst reviews exceptions, not raw PDFs.

  • Operations
    30 min / week
    Field form manual processing

    Operations coordinators spend 30+ minutes per week manually transcribing paper forms submitted by field teams into the operations database and customer records.

    Operations Agent
    0 min
    Agent ingests every field form

    The agent extracts all key-value pairs and table rows from submitted forms via Textract and writes structured records to the ops wiki and CRM simultaneously — no coordinator touch needed.

  • Legal
    6 min / week
    Executed contract signature check

    A paralegal manually opens each returned contract PDF to visually confirm all required signature blocks are populated before filing the document — slow and prone to missed blanks.

    Legal Agent
    0 min
    Agent verifies all signatures

    The agent runs Detect signatures on every returned contract and flags any document where a required block is unsigned, routing it back to the counterparty automatically before a paralegal sees it.

+ 100s of other AWS Textract automations
Average monthly
11 hrs / person / month
Average monthly
11 hrs / person / month
Calculator

Calculate what your team saves

Team size
10 people
Hourly rate
$20 / hr
Hours saved / week
28
Hours saved / year
1,400
Annual ROI
$28,000

Based on AWS Textract's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~2.8 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.

Connect

How to plug AWS Textract into Actionist

Pick the connection method that suits your environment.

The fastest path to AWS Textract. The agent connects through Actionist's MCP server using your AWS credentials — no token management, no SDK setup, just authorise and start processing documents immediately.

1
Open the Apps tab

Find AWS Textract in the Apps library and click Connect. MCP is selected by default.

2
Provide your AWS credentials

Enter your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, then select the AWS region where your documents and S3 buckets reside (e.g. us-east-1). Actionist stores these securely and uses them to sign Textract API calls on the agent's behalf.

3
Test the connection

Actionist runs a read-only call to verify the handshake. You're ready.

Actions

18 actions your agent can call

Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.

Triggers

8 events your agent can react to

Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.

Skills

Skills that pair with AWS Textract

Reusable agent skills that work well alongside this app.

No paired skills curated yet. Add this app to your agent to discover what fits.
MCP servers

MCP servers that work with AWS Textract

Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.

No MCP servers indexed for this app yet.
FAQs

Questions about AWS Textract + Actionist

How do I connect AWS Textract to Actionist?
Open the Apps tab, find AWS Textract, and click Connect. You will need an AWS IAM Access Key ID and Secret Access Key for a user or role with textract:* permissions. Paste them in, select your AWS region, and click Test connection — Actionist verifies the credentials with a lightweight API call before saving them. For tightly scoped access, attach only the AmazonTextractFullAccess managed policy plus s3:GetObject on the buckets holding your documents.
What AWS IAM permissions does the agent need?
The minimum required permissions are textract:* (or individual textract:Analyze*, textract:Detect*, textract:Start*, textract:Get*, textract:List* actions) plus s3:GetObject on any S3 buckets your documents are stored in. If you use async jobs with SNS notifications, also add sns:Publish on the notification topic. Create a dedicated IAM user or role for Actionist rather than using your root credentials — this way you can audit Textract usage and revoke access without affecting other services.
Can agents combine AWS Textract with other apps in a single workflow?
Yes — and that is where Textract-powered agents deliver most of their value. A common pattern: the agent detects an invoice in a Gmail attachment, runs Analyze Receipt or Invoice, appends the extracted vendor and amount to Google Sheets, and notifies the finance team in Slack — all in one workflow. Textract handles the unstructured-to-structured conversion; every other app in your stack receives clean, typed data rather than a raw PDF.
What document types and formats does AWS Textract support?
Textract processes JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and PDF files. Synchronous APIs (DetectDocumentText, AnalyzeDocument, AnalyzeExpense, AnalyzeID) accept single-page images or single-page PDFs up to 10 MB directly. For multi-page PDFs or documents larger than 10 MB, use the async APIs (StartDocumentTextDetection, StartDocumentAnalysis, etc.) which read from S3 and support up to 3,000 pages and 500 MB. Handwritten content is supported for text detection and form extraction — accuracy varies with scan quality.
How do async Textract jobs work, and how do agents poll for results?
Async jobs work in two steps: the agent submits the document with a Start* action and receives a JobId, then polls with a Get* action until the status returns SUCCEEDED (typically 30 seconds to several minutes depending on document size). For high-volume pipelines, configure an SNS topic on the job so AWS notifies your workflow the moment the job completes — the agent then calls Get* once rather than polling repeatedly. Failed jobs return a FAILED status with an error message; the agent should log the JobId and error, and re-queue the document.
What are Textract confidence scores, and should I trust every extracted value?
Every block returned by Textract includes a Confidence score from 0–100 indicating the model's certainty about that extraction. For production workflows, configure the agent to route any field below your threshold (typically 80–90 for financial data) to a human review queue rather than writing it directly to the downstream system. Confidence tends to be lower on poor-quality scans, faint ink, or unusual fonts — improving scan resolution and lighting consistently lifts scores. The Detect signatures feature returns a boolean confidence rather than a score; treat any non-SIGNED result as requiring human verification.
How do I improve extraction accuracy for my specific document type?
For standard document types (receipts, invoices, IDs, forms), the general Textract model is already highly accurate and requires no training. For unusual proprietary forms or industry-specific layouts, use the Create custom document adapter action to fine-tune a model layer on your labelled examples — Amazon recommends at least 100 labelled pages per document type. Once trained, pass the adapter ID in your analysis calls and accuracy on that document type improves significantly. Use List custom adapters to audit which adapter versions are active in your workflows.
What are AWS Textract's rate limits and how do I avoid throttling?
Default synchronous API limits are 5 transactions per second (TPS) for AnalyzeDocument and 50 TPS for DetectDocumentText; async job limits allow up to 2 concurrent analysis jobs per account in most regions by default. For high-volume workflows, use async jobs with SQS/SNS to queue work and avoid bursting the synchronous limits. If you regularly hit limits, request a quota increase via the AWS Service Quotas console — increases are typically approved within 24 hours. The agent should implement exponential backoff on ThrottlingException responses.