Reading text off a photograph — a receipt, a recipe card, a serial plate — saves a genuinely tedious amount of typing. It is also wrong sometimes, in ways that are hard to spot: a smudged 8 becomes a 3, a line wraps, a price attaches to the wrong item.
The failure is quiet, which is the danger
An extraction that fails loudly is harmless — you try again. An extraction that is subtly wrong and written straight to the record produces a serial number that does not match the appliance, discovered eighteen months later during a warranty claim.
So the output is always a proposal
Whatever comes off a photo lands in a review sheet, editable, next to the source image, and nothing is stored until a person confirms it. No exceptions, no confidence threshold above which it writes silently, no "we were pretty sure". The rule is worth more than the seconds it costs.
Automation should remove the typing, not the judgment.