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Unlocking Document Intelligence: Mistral OCR Now Available in Azure AI Foundry

Naomi Moneypenny's avatar
Naomi Moneypenny
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 09, 2025

Reveal the hidden potential of your documents with Mistral OCR, now available in Azure AI Foundry. This state-of-the-art OCR model transforms unstructured content into actionable insights with unmatched speed, precision, and multilingual versatility.

Every organization has a treasure trove of information—buried not in databases, but in documents. From scanned contracts and handwritten forms to research papers and regulatory filings, this knowledge often sits locked in static formats, invisible to modern AI systems.

Imagine if we could teach machines not just to read, but to truly understand the structure and nuance of these documents. What if equations, images, tables, and multilingual text could be seamlessly extracted, indexed, and acted upon—at scale?

That future is here.

Today we are announcing the launch of Mistral OCR in the Azure AI Foundry model catalog—a state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model that brings intelligent document understanding to a whole new level. Designed for speed, precision, and multilingual versatility, Mistral OCR unlocks the potential of unstructured content with unmatched performance.

From Patient Charts to Investment Reports—Built for Every Industry 

Mistral OCR’s ability to extract structure from complex documents makes it transformative across a range of verticals: 

Healthcare 

Hospitals and health systems can digitize clinical notes, lab results, and patient intake forms, transforming scanned content into structured data for downstream AI applications—improving care coordination, automation, and insights. 

Finance & Insurance 

From loan applications and KYC documents to claims forms and regulatory disclosures, Mistral OCR helps financial institutions process sensitive documents faster, more accurately, and with multilingual support—ensuring compliance and improving operational efficiency. 

Education & Research 

Academic institutions and research teams can turn PDFs of scientific papers, course materials, and diagrams into AI-readable formats. Mistral OCR’s support for equations, charts, and LaTeX-style formatting makes it ideal for scientific knowledge extraction. 

Legal & Government 

With its multilingual and high-fidelity OCR capabilities, legal teams and public agencies can digitize contracts, historical records, and filings—accelerating review workflows, preserving archival materials, and enabling transparent governance. 

 

Key Highlights of Mistral OCR

According to Mistral their OCR model stands apart due to the following:

  • State-of-the-Art Document Understanding

Mistral OCR excels in parsing complex, multimodal documents—extracting tables, math, and figures with markdown-style clarity. It goes beyond recognition to deliver understanding.

 benchmark testing. Whether you’re working in Hindi, Arabic, French, or Chinese—this model adapts seamlessly.

  • State-of-the-Art Document Understanding 

Mistral OCR excels in parsing complex, multimodal documents—extracting tables, math, and figures with markdown-style clarity. It goes beyond recognition to deliver understanding. 

  • Multilingual by Design 

With support for dozens of languages and scripts, Mistral OCR achieves 99%+ fuzzy match scores in benchmark testing. Whether you’re working in Hindi, Arabic, French, or Chinese—this model adapts seamlessly. 

  • Fastest in Its Class 

Process up to 2,000 pages per minute on a single node. This speed makes it ideal for enterprise document pipelines and real-time applications. 

  • Doc-as-Prompt + Structured Output 

Turn documents into intelligent prompts—then extract structured, JSON-formatted output for downstream use in agents, workflows, or analytics engines. 

 

Why use Mistral OCR on Azure AI Foundry?

Mistral OCR is now available as serverless APIs through Models as a Service (MaaS) in Azure AI Foundry. This enables enterprise-scale workloads with ease. 

  • Network Isolation for Inferencing: Protect your data from public network access.
  • Expanded Regional Availability: Access from multiple regions.
  • Data Privacy and Security: Robust measures to ensure data protection.
  • Quick Endpoint Provisioning: Set up an OCR endpoint in Azure AI Foundry in seconds.

Azure AI ensures seamless integration, enhanced security, and rapid deployment for your AI needs. 

 

How to deploy Mistral OCR model in Azure AI Foundry? 

Prerequisites:  

  1. If you don’t have an Azure subscription, get one here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/purchase-options/pay-as-you-go 
  2. Familiarize yourself with Azure AI Model Catalog 
  3. Create an Azure  AI Foundry hub and project. Make sure you pick East US, West US3, South Central US, West US, North Central US, East US 2 or Sweden Central as the Azure region for the hub. 

Create a deployment to obtain the inference API and key:  

  1. Open the model card in the model catalog on Azure AI Foundry. 
  2. Click on Deploy and select the Pay-as-you-go option. 
  3. Subscribe to the Marketplace offer and deploy. You can also review the API pricing at this step. 
  4. You should land on the deployment page that shows you the API and key in less than a minute.

These steps are outlined in detail in the product documentation. 

 

From Documents to Decisions 

The ability to extract meaning from documents—accurately, at scale, and across languages—is no longer a bottleneck. With Mistral OCR now available in Azure AI Foundry, organizations can move beyond basic text extraction to unlock true document intelligence. This isn’t just about reading documents. It’s about transforming how we interact with the knowledge they contain.

Try it. Build with it. And see what becomes possible when documents speak your language.

 

Updated Apr 09, 2025
Version 4.0
artificial intelligence
azure ai foundry
computer vision
generative ai
model catalog

8 Comments

  • feeeeelixj's avatar
    feeeeelixj
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 05, 2025

    This was published three weeks ago and works for me:
    https://github.com/azure-ai-foundry/foundry-samples/blob/main/samples/mistral/python/mistral-ocr-with-vlm.ipynb

  • ghoshanj's avatar
    ghoshanj
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 24, 2025

    Without having a document_url implementation, this is pretty much useless guys. I want to upload to storage account and do OCR on it

  • dpo's avatar
    dpo
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 14, 2025

    Same issue. null returned with a basic test like below : 

    curl "https://{endpoint url}/v1/ocr" \

      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \

      -H "Authorization: Bearer {API_KEY}” \

      -d '{

        "model": "mistral-ocr-2503",

        "document": {

          "type": "document_url",

          "document_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00663"

        }

      }'

    • dmusil's avatar
      dmusil
      Copper Contributor
      Apr 15, 2025

      dpo check this conversation on GitHub (nevermind the project this conversation is in). The comment left by user 'lfelder' has valuable info on how to at least getting OCR working on base64 encoded images. I can confirm this works.

      url = url_to_azure_endpoint
headers = {
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "Authorization": "Bearer your_bearer_token"
}
base64_image = your_base_64_encoded_image
data = {
    "model": "mistral-ocr",
    "document": {
        "image_url": f"data:image/png;base64,{base64_image}"
    },
# Optional parameters:
    "include_image_base64": True,
    "image_limit": 5,
    "image_min_size": 100
}
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=data)

      Microsoft still has to provide documentation on how to process documents via 'document_url' though as this seems to require some preprocessing we don't know about yet.

  • rittikbasu007's avatar
    rittikbasu007
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 14, 2025

    We are also facing the same problem as mentioned in the above comment. getting null in response every time. Can you please share any proper API documentation?

    • dmusil's avatar
      dmusil
      Copper Contributor
      Apr 14, 2025

      rittikbasu007we've done some more digging and found out that when deploying the Mistral OCR model in East US / East US 2 it will at least return error responses. More details of our tests can be found in this comment on GitHub, as we're trying to implement the Azure Mistral OCR model in a certain Open Source solution:

      https://github.com/danny-avila/LibreChat/issues/6814#issuecomment-2797173480

  • dmusil's avatar
    dmusil
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 11, 2025

    We've spent hours getting this model to work in the Azure AI Service but it will only return 'null' responses. Is there any documentation describing the possible differences the Mistral OCR model has in the Azure AI Service as compared to directly at Mistral AI? We've tried the same request body that works well at Mistral AI but our deployment in the Azure AI Service only responds with 'null'. No errors or anything else.

    • qitao's avatar
      qitao
      Copper Contributor
      Apr 24, 2025

      Same with u! I knew I am not alone. It has been a half month, still got null in response, and the document is wrong which say 'api-key' but the real name is 'Authorization'. So disappointed for Microsoft. It's a ragtag group/team, slapdash organization, a Mickey Mouse operation!!!