Techniques for training an optical character recognition (OCR) model to detect and recognize text in images for robotic process automation (RPA) are disclosed. A text detection model and a text recognition model may be trained separately and then combined to produce the OCR model. Synthetic data and a smaller amount of real, human-labeled data may be used for training to increase the speed and accuracy with which the OCR text detection model and the text recognition model can be trained. After the OCR model has been trained, a workflow may be generated that includes an activity calling the OCR model, and a robot implementing the workflow may be generated and deployed.