Amazon Textract announces updates to its Analyze ID API

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from any document or image. Analyze ID is a specialized API within Textract that extracts data from identity documents, such U.S. Driver Licenses and U.S. Passports. Today, we are pleased to announce updates to our Analyze ID extraction API. Amazon Textract now provides data extraction for the machine readable zone, or MRZ code, on U.S. Passports. This is in addition to the other fields you can extract on U.S. passports today, such as document number, date of birth, and date of issue, for a total of 10 fields on U.S. passports. You can continue to extract 19 fields from U.S. Driver Licenses including inferred fields, such as first name, last name, and address. Besides support for the new MRZ code field, we have further improved the accuracy for fields such as expiration date and place of birth that were already supported in the previous version. Along with normalized key-value pairs, Analyze ID now provides the entire OCR output in the API response. Customers can obtain both key-value pairs and the raw OCR extract through a single API request. This update will be available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US-East), AWS GovCloud (US-West), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) starting November 1st. To get started, log on to the Amazon Textract console to try out the new feature. To learn more about Textract capabilities, please visit the Amazon Textract [website](/textract/), [developer guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/textract/latest/dg/how-it-works-identity.html), or [resources page](/textract/resources/).