Butler Labs OCR in Flutter | Code On The Rocks

Butler Labs is an AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) platform with models fine tuned to extract important data from a variety of commonly encountered documents:

• Driver’s Licenses
• Passports
• Health Insurance Cards
• Paystubs
• Invoices
• Receipts
• W9s
• Mortgage Statements

What makes this platform even more attractive from a developer standpoint is that they provide a generous free tier of 500 scans per month and a comprehensive REST API. This means you can basically add an OCR upgrade to your app today.

Setup

API Key

To start using the Butler Labs OCR product, you’ll need two values:

After creating an account, you’ll find your API key at the top of the “Settings” page. The API key is a sensitive value that enables access to your account. For that reason, you should avoid adding it to version control and instead pass it to your app using dart-define:

flutter run --dart-define BUTLER_API_KEY=1234567890

Or my preferred method, dart-define-from-file. First create a config.json file in your app’s asset folder:

{
  "BUTLER_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY",
}