Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has played a significant role to reduce manual data entry efforts since its introduction. Nevertheless, traditional OCR is highly inflexible. This doesn’t sit well with the variety of documents that organizations need to process on a daily basis.
The good news for you is that switching to a powerful solution that covers everything related to the automation of document extraction has never been easier. Switch from traditional OCR to AI OCR to process your documents!
Contents
1. What is Optical Character Recognition?
2. Constraints with traditional OCR solutions
– Dependent on templates and rules
– Not suitable for variation in documents
– High cost
3. What is AI OCR also called Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)?
4. Why IDP processes documents better
5. 4 reasons why Parashift IDP is superior
– 1- One Cloud OCR API for everything
– 2- Fully GDPR compliant cloud platform
– 3- Unique Document Swarm Learning technology
– 4- No need to configure templates
6. IDP Cloud as a strategic hub for everything related to your document extraction
1. What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enables the conversion of printed or handwritten text into a machine-readable format. Employees can thus reduce the manual entry of documents. OCR was originally developed for people who are blind to convert printed characters into speech. It was only with the next stage that more and more template-based OCR was developed. This allows the system to be taught rules to capture and output a specific passage in the document in a dedicated way.
For the extraction of highly structured documents with the same layout and a high volume, template-based OCR works well. However, the majority of documents you process today in enterprise processes exclude this.
2. Constraints with traditional Optical Character Recognition solutions
So template-based OCR solutions do a good job of automating structured documents with standardized formats. However, it is very likely that you work with a large number of customers and suppliers in your company. Invoices differ greatly between different customers and suppliers, let alone the formats of other documents.
Below, we’ll look at some of the limitations of traditional OCR that can cause document processing difficulties in your organization:
Dependent on templates and rules
Template-based OCR is not dynamic and thus highly inflexible. It requires clear rules and templates, which is only achieved by configuring the capture solution for the individual fields to be extracted. Furthermore, the quality of text recognition and extraction depends directly on the quality of the image fed to the software.
Not suitable for variation in documents
Normal Optical Character Recognition can’t handle the wide variation of documents you need to process in your organization. This includes documents in semi-structured and unstructured form.
High cost
To increase the Optical Character Recognition accuracy, more templates and rules need to be configured. This drastically increases configuration and maintenance costs. In addition, the data must be manually checked and corrected on an ongoing basis, which leads to a high level of effort.
3. What is AI OCR?
The limitations of template-based OCR and the opportunities presented by significant advances in technology has led to the development of a better solution.
AI-based OCR, often called Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), is tailor-made as a solution for automating document extraction due to advanced technologies combined with Optical Character Recognition. To do this, the data capture system uses a variety of powerful AI technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.
IDP is an integral part of intelligent automation. It refers to the methods used to automatically identify objects, capture data about them, and input it directly into computer systems with little or no human involvement.
4. Why IDP processes documents better
IDP requires no templates, no rules and hardly any configuration. This makes the solution extremely flexible and perfect for automating documents from structured to unstructured form that you need to process on a daily basis. Moreover, IDP not only extracts the data from the documents, but also understands the context from it. It is time to switch from traditional Optical Character Recognition to IDP to process your documents!
The capabilities using a bank check as an example:
Different form: Bank checks differ from bank to bank
Digital text: Preprinted text (e.g. bank logo)
Handwritten text: Written amount
Amount in numerical form: $500
Amount in text form: Five hundred US dollars
Because the IDP software understands the context of the data, the AI technologies correctly interpret that ‘$500’ represents the same as ‘five hundred US dollars’. Thanks to machine learning and deep learning technologies, the solution learns based on the data and continuously improves. This makes effective and efficient capture and processing of even complex and unstructured documents feasible, allowing you to automate the whole invoice processing workflow, among other things.
Deep Cloud API for OCR: Parashift’s Document Swarm Learning for machine learning combines learning data from all use cases and customers on the platform.
5. 4 reasons why Parashift IDP is superior
Many IDP vendors on the market specialize in a few use cases. Parashift’s IDP platform with Optical Character Recognition, on the other hand, is industry-agnostic and leverages all document types and the data captured from them to provide you with an all-in-one OCR cloud service.
4 reasons why Parashift’s online cloud OCR is superior:
1- One Cloud OCR API for everything
Whether it’s purchase orders, invoices, forms, the entire incoming mail or even individual document types: With the Parashift platform, you get the best online Optical Character Recognition for everything. This allows for ease of use, quick scaling and customization to meet all your needs.
2- Fully GDPR compliant cloud platform
Parashift’s modern cloud OCR infrastructure is fully GDPR compliant, making it safe for businesses in any industry, anywhere in the world. ISO27001 and HIPAA compliant data centers make Parashift a secure provider for your document extraction needs. Read more information regarding security and compliance here.
3- Unique Document Swarm Learning technology
At the heart of Parashift AI OCR text recognition software lies its proprietary Document Swarm Learning technology. This unique approach to solving document extraction is the first of its kind. Using state-of-the-art AI technologies for capturing, classifying and extracting unstructured documents combined with the cloud-first approach, global AI training is achieved across all customers and across billions of data points. This guarantees a continuously improving OCR API.
In addition, the innovative approach opens up the possibility of cost and effort sharing with platform users. IDP progress is continuously achieved through all documents processed in the cloud and immediately shared with all customers in the network. Platform-wide learning brings massive benefits to your organization:
- Highest recognition rates, even for completely unknown documents.
- The solution continuously improves through all processing of all documents and all customers on the platform.
- The number of training data creates an increasingly potent OCR cloud service.
4- No need to configure templates
Machine Learning-based OCR completely eliminates the need to configure templates and rules, giving you tremendous flexibility. And not only that:
With the Parashift Cloud AI OCR API, you get document processing software that’s quick to implement and doesn’t require projects with external specialists for enhancement and optimization. This leads to shortened turnaround times and reduced costs.
15x faster and 30x better results thanks to Document Swarm Learning
6. AI OCR Cloud as a strategic hub for everything related to your document extraction
Parashift becomes your strategic hub for everything related to document extraction. The solution is ideally suited for the automatic processing of hundreds of business documents. These include pension fund statements, delivery bills and many more. Do not hesitate to tell us about your automation project; we are happy to help you.
