Have you ever had to manually transcribe a document or image into text? It's a tedious and time-consuming process, and prone to errors. That's where OCR (Optical Character Recognition) comes in.
OCR is a technology that allows you to extract text and structure from scanned documents and images. Machine learning algorithms trained to identify patterns in the shapes and arrangements of characters will extract text and labels from 'chaotic' data sources. Accuracy has improved greatly these last years, making it possible to digitize and organize your paper documents, PDFs, and images in a matter of seconds, even in case of hand-written notes.
So why is OCR cool?
For starters, it's more efficient. It's much faster and produces less errors than manual transcription, which is anyway a thankless task so your employees will be happy to automate it away.
A second reason is it creates transparency. You can finally search and organize your documents using their entire content, not just the few manually created labels that inevitably restrict you in the future. Need to classify customer application PDFs by street-name? No problem (regular expressions are your friend in such cases). OCR allows you to sort and categorize your documents dynamically.
The third and most exciting reason is that OCR opens the door to new opportunities. You can now create services, models or processes that use all the data available to you or your company, not just the subset stored in a database. In that sense, OCR is a key enabler and foundation for break-through services.
Last but not least, OCR is environmentally friendly. By supporting the digitization of documents, it helps reduce the amount of physical paper printed, stored, and physically sent around.
OCR is a technology that allows you to extract text and structure from scanned documents and images. Machine learning algorithms trained to identify patterns in the shapes and arrangements of characters will extract text and labels from 'chaotic' data sources. Accuracy has improved greatly these last years, making it possible to digitize and organize your paper documents, PDFs, and images in a matter of seconds, even in case of hand-written notes.
So why is OCR cool?
For starters, it's more efficient. It's much faster and produces less errors than manual transcription, which is anyway a thankless task so your employees will be happy to automate it away.
A second reason is it creates transparency. You can finally search and organize your documents using their entire content, not just the few manually created labels that inevitably restrict you in the future. Need to classify customer application PDFs by street-name? No problem (regular expressions are your friend in such cases). OCR allows you to sort and categorize your documents dynamically.
The third and most exciting reason is that OCR opens the door to new opportunities. You can now create services, models or processes that use all the data available to you or your company, not just the subset stored in a database. In that sense, OCR is a key enabler and foundation for break-through services.
Last but not least, OCR is environmentally friendly. By supporting the digitization of documents, it helps reduce the amount of physical paper printed, stored, and physically sent around.