Google Vision OCR vs SAM 3

Google Vision OCR, released as part of the Cloud Vision API’s general availability in February 2016, is a proprietary Google Cloud service for extracting text from images and documents. It supports common formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and PDF, and provides two main modes: TEXT_DETECTION for short snippets and scene text, and DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION for dense documents, which returns structured layout information with bounding boxes.

While not an LLM (so it has no token context window or parameter count), the service performs OCR across printed text and some handwriting. It outputs detected text along with positional metadata, making it useful for digitizing scanned files, receipts, forms, and signs. However, complex layouts like tables often require downstream processing. Accessible via REST and RPC APIs, with client libraries in major languages, Google Vision OCR is widely used for document processing pipelines, archival, and accessibility applications.

Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.

Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.