Does Claude Code's Vision Recognition Actually Work?
A few days ago, the team asked what our most repetitive task was. We quickly found it, manually reading quantities and product names from buyer-sent order photos, then inputting them one by one into a spreadsheet. Someone suggested "AI can read photos, right?" I was skeptical but decided to try handing this job to Claude Code anyway.
The result was surprising. Recognition accuracy exceeded 95%.
How It Works
Step one is straightforward. Upload the order photo from the buyer to Claude Code. It doesn't matter if it's a photo or scanned document. In step two, Claude Code recognizes the text in the image and extracts product names and quantities. Step three involves the Google Sheets API automatically filling the extracted data into the spreadsheet.
The most impressive part was the "multi-language conversion" feature. Orders written in Chinese are automatically converted to the target language, and typos are corrected in the process. Work that used to take 40 minutes of manual input now completes in 10 seconds.
Small Problems and Their Solutions
Initially, low-resolution images resulted in high recognition failure rates. But after I rewrote the prompt to request "process blurry images," things improved dramatically. Another challenge was handwritten orders, which currently have only a 60% recognition rate. So the team decided to continue processing those manually.
What I'm Feeling Now
I used to think "AI only knows how to write code." But watching it read information from photos, organize that information, and automatically fill it into spreadsheets changed my mind. This is truly automation that non-developers can do. A good prompt and proper tool-to-data connections are all that's needed.
Our next goal is to recognize shipping numbers from photos and fully automate package tracking.