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Dex is Scale’s document understanding service that transforms unstructured documents into actionable, structured data. It is a comprehensive platform that combines advanced OCR, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract meaningful information from PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and more.

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Why Use Dex?

Around 80-90% of enterprise data lives within unstructured formats such as PDFs and DOCX files. Dex solves the most common challenges of programmatic document processing:
  • Format Diversity: Process any document type with a single API—business reports, financial documents, legal contracts, healthcare records, and more.
  • Unstructured Data: Convert complex layouts into structured JSON with semantic understanding, including text, tables, charts, and infographics.
  • Quality Variations: Handle scanned, handwritten, and low-quality documents with high accuracy across multiple languages.
  • Scalability: Process thousands of documents efficiently with built-in scalable infrastructure.
  • Flexibility: Choose from multiple OCR engines and customize extraction with your own tools and workflows.

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Core Primitives

Dex is designed as a capability rather than a standalone product, centered around composable primitives that can be used, extended, and combined:

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File Management

Upload, retrieve, and securely store confidential documents with fine-grained access control. Supports persistent storage with metadata tracking, secure access patterns, and configurable data retention policies for automatic lifecycle management.

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Parse

Convert documents into machine-readable formats using multiple OCR engines. Dex extracts:
  • Plain text in multiple languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, German, and more)
  • Tables including small and large tabular data (up to 500+ rows)
  • Checkboxes for form processing
  • Images and figures with bounding box information
  • Charts for data visualization analysis
The parsing process includes intelligent chunking strategies:
  • Block-level: Low-level separation of layout blocks
  • Section-level: Semantic separation by detecting titles and subtitles
  • Page-level: Page-by-page analysis and processing

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Vector Stores

Vectorize and index parsed documents for semantic search and retrieval. Vector stores enable:
  • Semantic search over document chunks with embedding-based similarity
  • Context management for multi-file processing and large documents
  • Regex search for pattern-based extraction (dates, IDs, emails, etc.)
  • Document summarization for quick overview generation

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Extract

Extract structured data from parse results or document collections using:
  • Custom schemas defined with Pydantic models
  • Natural language prompts to guide extraction
  • Citations that link extracted data to source locations
  • Confidence scores for quality assessment
  • RAG-enhanced extraction using vector store context
  • Agentic extraction with custom MCP tools for advanced workflows

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Ways to Interact with Dex

Dex provides multiple interfaces to support different use cases:
  • REST API: OpenAPI-documented endpoints for direct integration
  • Python SDK: High-level wrapper for rapid development with both sync and async support
  • MCP Server: Model Context Protocol integration for agent-based workflows (coming soon…)

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Common Use Cases

  • Financial Services: Automate invoice processing, tax document analysis, and financial report extraction.
  • Healthcare: Extract patient information from medical records, insurance claims, and healthcare forms.
  • Legal: Analyze contracts, process discovery documents, and extract key clauses and obligations.
  • Business Operations: Process HR documents, supply chain orders, customer service tickets, and business reports.

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Understanding Industry Document Challenges

Different industries face unique document processing challenges based on their document types and layouts. For a comprehensive overview of typical document formats and layout challenges across finance, healthcare, insurance, and legal sectors, see Industry Document Types and Layout Challenges. This guide covers:
  • Finance: SEC filings, research reports, and financial statements with multi-column layouts, complex footnotes, and embedded visualizations
  • Healthcare: Medical records and clinical documentation with handwritten elements, scanned materials, and variable form structures
  • Insurance: Claims forms (CMS-1500, UB-04) combining typed prompts with handwritten responses on poor-quality scans
  • Legal: Contracts and court filings requiring hierarchical structure preservation through complex sections and redlined annotations
Understanding these document-specific challenges can help you optimize your Dex configuration for better extraction accuracy and results.

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Language Support

Dex supports multi-language document processing with good support for germanic languages. For non-germanic, there are 35 languages including but not limited to: Afrikaans: 🇿🇦 - Albanian: 🇦🇱 - Arabic: 🇸🇦 - Armenian: 🇦🇲 - Belarusian: 🇧🇾 - Bengali: 🇧🇩 - Bulgarian: 🇧🇬 - Catalan: 🇪🇸 - Chinese: 🇨🇳 - Croatian: 🇭🇷 - Czech: 🇨🇿 - Danish: 🇩🇰 - Dutch: 🇳🇱 - English: 🇬🇧 - Estonian: 🇪🇪 - Filipino: 🇵🇭 - Finnish: 🇫🇮 - French: 🇫🇷 - German: 🇩🇪 - Greek: 🇬🇷 - Gujarati: 🇮🇳 - Hebrew: 🇮🇱 - Hindi: 🇮🇳 - Hungarian: 🇭🇺 - Icelandic: 🇮🇸 - Indonesian: 🇮🇩 - Italian: 🇮🇹 - Japanese: 🇯🇵 - Kannada: 🇮🇳 - Khmer: 🇰🇭 - Korean: 🇰🇷 - Lao: 🇱🇦 - Latvian: 🇱🇻 - Lithuanian: 🇱🇹 - Macedonian: 🇲🇰 - Malay: 🇲🇾 - Malayalam: 🇮🇳 - Marathi: 🇮🇳 - Nepali: 🇳🇵 - Norwegian: 🇳🇴 - Persian: 🇮🇷 - Polish: 🇵🇱 - Portuguese: 🇵🇹 - Punjabi: 🇮🇳 - Romanian: 🇷🇴 - Russian: 🇷🇺 - Serbian: 🇷🇸 - Slovak: 🇸🇰 - Slovenian: 🇸🇮 - Spanish: 🇪🇸 - Swedish: 🇸🇪 - Tagalog: 🇵🇭 - Tamil: 🇮🇳 - Telugu: 🇮🇳 - Thai: 🇹🇭 - Turkish: 🇹🇷 - Ukrainian: 🇺🇦 - Vietnamese: 🇻🇳 - Yiddish: 🇮🇱

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Key Features

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Citations and Traceability

Every extracted field can be associated with its source location (page number, bounding box, text snippet), enabling auditability and human review.

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Confidence Scoring

Assigns confidence scores to extracted fields based on model outputs, helping you filter and prioritize results for downstream review.

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Flexible OCR Engine Support

Choose the best OCR engine for your use case—Reducto for English and Latin-script documents, Iris for non-English and non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, CJK, etc.), or integrate your own custom engine.

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Access Control

Fine-grained authorization with ReBAC (Relationship-Based Access Control) for projects, files, parse results, and vector stores.

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Data Lifecycle Management

Configurable retention policies automatically manage the lifecycle of files and processing artifacts, helping you meet compliance requirements and optimize storage costs.

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Getting Started

To begin using Dex, you’ll need a Scale account with SGP access. Quick Links: Dex makes document understanding accessible to developers while delivering the power and accuracy required for production applications.