OCR and Intelligent Document Extraction Guide for Beginners

How do you imagine software robots help humans to automate operational activities? Have you ever thought about robots taking over manual chores like extracting thousands of documents everyday? Let’s have a basic overview about OCR and Intelligent Document Extraction to find out how it can enhance operational efficiency.

What is OCR? 

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is built using machine learning algorithms to convert any image with text into digital data that is readable by the machine. This software recognizes characters and symbols on a document, scans images and photographs and is trained in several languages to interpret the data it scans from the document. Within seconds, your documents are ready to be classified and processed. 

How does OCR work?

Imagine you’ve got a paper document – for example: ID card, passport, receipt, or any PDF documents your partner sent to you by email. Obviously, a scanner is not enough to make this information available for editing, say in Microsoft Word. All a scanner can do is create an image or a snapshot of the document that is nothing more than a collection of black and white or color dots, known as a raster image. In order to extract and repurpose data from scanned documents, camera images or image-only PDFs, you need an OCR software that would single out letters on the image, put them into words then words into sentences, thus enabling you to access and extract the content of the original document.

However, the process of extraction cannot be done by OCR itself. Thus, this is where the intelligent document extraction comes in. 

Intelligent Document Extraction, how does it help us?

Intelligent Document Extraction is to extract the text or data from documents and classify them based on their category. For example, we have a PDF invoice to extract with certain data fields to pull out. We can apply this Intelligent Document Extraction to read, identify, and extract the targeted data fields then categorize them based on their origins, e.g. as ‘invoice number’, ‘invoice date’, ‘item’, etc.

Intelligent Document Extraction automatically extracts data from PDF invoices and places the extracted data in Microsoft Excel based on respective data fields. As this technology is empowered with A.I. Machine Learning, it can easily identify and understand data fields in order to extract them accurately, offering superb accuracy and speed of data or document digitization. With self-learning A.I. Machine Learning, we can have a flexible and tailored document extraction catered to our needs, as A.I. Machine Learning enables the robot to handle documents even in the trickiest condition.

Choose your software wisely: OCR + IDE!

Choosing the right intelligent document extraction software or vendor is really important as it will affect the overall success of your project. In this term, evaluating tools your chosen software has is as important as saving your project from failing. As OCR plays a remarkably important role in Intelligent Document Extraction, considering its presence in your chosen software should be prioritized. OCR and Intelligent Document Extraction are complementary to one another, thus make sure you acknowledge this before picking the right document extraction software!

Intelligent data extraction can help businesses like finance, banking, and legal with loads of paperwork and invoices to streamline their processes and save the resources on manual invoicing. Zapbot is created to solve the challenges of different industries and is designed as a beginner-friendly software for you to experience: without coding, programming, or APIs!

To know more about Zapbot’s Intelligent Document Extraction, click here and try out Zapbot FREE TRIAL!