Why SmartSplitAI Does Not Accept Scanned Contracts or Photos

"I have a contract as a PDF. I took a photo with my phone. Will it work?"

No. And this isn't a technical limitation. It's an intentional decision: the cost of an OCR error in a contract is too high to accept the risk.

What OCR is and why it makes mistakes

OCR — Optical Character Recognition — extracts text from images. It takes a scan or photo and attempts to "read" the letters. The problem is that even the best OCR systems make errors. On clean printed text, accuracy can reach 98–99%. On a contract with small fonts, footnotes, tables, and signatures — it's significantly lower.

99% accuracy sounds good until you do the math: in a 10,000-character contract, that's 100 errors. One hundred incorrectly recognized characters. Some of them — in amounts, dates, and party names.

What an OCR error does to contract analysis

Here are real examples of how OCR errors distort meaning:

• Amount: "1,500,000" recognized as "1,5oo,ooo" → the amount is lost from analysis or extracted incorrectly.
• Date: "07/01/2026" → "07 01 2026" (separators lost) → not recognized as a date.
• Party name: "TechBuild Solutions LLC" → "TechBuild Sol utions LLC" (character dropped) → party name is broken.
• Penalty rate: "0.1%" → "0 1%" (decimal lost) → the penalty rate changes by a factor of 10.

Each of these errors isn't just an "inaccuracy." It's a risk to a business decision made based on the analysis.

Why this is unacceptable for contracts

A contract is not an article or a blog post. In a contract:

• One misread digit changes the value of an obligation.
• One lost date shifts a performance deadline.
• One corrupted party name makes the analysis meaningless.

SmartSplitAI builds its AI output from the extracted text. If the input text is distorted by OCR errors, the AI output becomes unreliable. And unreliable contract analysis is worse than no analysis: it creates false confidence.

What to do instead of scanning

If you only have a scan or photo of a contract:

1. Request the source file. Ask the counterparty to send a DOCX or a PDF saved from Word. This is standard business practice — requesting the source contract file is not unusual.

2. Check your PDF. Open the file and try highlighting text with your cursor. If text highlights and copies — the PDF contains a text layer and works. If it doesn't — it's a scan.

3. Use TXT as a fallback. In a pinch, manually retype the key sections into a text file and upload it. This won't give you a full analysis, but it will let you check the main clauses.

Accepted formats

SmartSplitAI Contract Review works with:

• DOCX — recommended format. Preserves structure, tables, and tracked changes.
• Text-layer PDF — accepted. How to check: open the PDF and try highlighting text with your cursor.
• TXT — plain text. Works, but without formatting.

Scans, photos, and PDFs without a text layer are not accepted. This isn't a product limitation. It's user protection against unreliable analysis.