In an advanced world where people are going crazy for digital trends, businesses are going for ways to digitize processes to minimize manual work. COVID-19 also contributed to the trend for customers to carry out their daily tasks through digital platforms. From shopping to banking, consumers prefer to do everything through online means. During the last years especially, customers’ attention towards online trends has skyrocketed. This new normal has pushed businesses to possess a digital space for their product and services. With OCR technology companies are trying to automate their data extraction work.
A Bit on OCR Technology
OCR process is a technological solution that fetches information from images and transforms them into machine-readable. There are multiple documents such as digital images or printed that can go through optical character recognition software. Handwritten documents that were once considered impossible to fetch data from can be read through OCR systems and can be converted into automated format.
Manual vs Digital Data Entry Methods
Before the advent of technology, businesses used to carry out their work manually i.e. with the aid of humans. These procedures were time-consuming and tedious and also possessed chances of inaccuracy. Data entry was considered a hectic process of accomplishing the task.
But finally, thanks to advanced technology, as new trends have emerged, OCR technology has shared the burden of work. Entering the data is no more a task these days. OCR scanning fetches any kind of information from multiple documents and converts them into editable or searchable information.
Optical Character Recognition Services – The Process
OCR solutions consist of OCR technology and AI to transform various scanned documents into an editable or machine-readable form. It deploys ML and computer vision to read the documents’ incorporated text to offer authentic results to customers. Digitized OCR technology analyzes the documents in the form of images and examines the texts to convert them into digital form. This assists the software to have a comparison between images of existing characters to those saved in the OCR engines’ database.
- Pre-processing: The process that requires preparing the data for extraction is performed. Text is aligned in straight lines, light is adjusted, and the sharpness is enhanced
- Extraction of text after analyzing multiple styles that the information possesses
- Post-processing: Finally recognizes the information in multiple styles
Industries Using OCR Technology
Any type of document be it multilingual, structured, or unstructured can be processed through OCR technology. It is significant to consider that it can fetch data from customer-delivered URLs of the data.
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Healthcare sector
This industry is taking full advantage of OCR. Patient’s medical data possessing reports, previous illness, and tests can be examined, and stored using OCR. It dramatically reduces manual labor while conveniently digitizing the data. labor.
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Banks
Banks are one of the most popular users of OCR technology. Information can be extracted from payslips, checks, and many other documents.
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Legal Industry
This industry manages a huge amount of paperwork therefore it gets great benefitted from OCR technology. Organizations can convert documents such as affidavits, judgments, and statements into digitized forms.
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Tourism
OCR permits tourists to examine their own documents on the hotels’ online platform, thus, enabling them to carry out self-check-in.
Advantages of Optical Character Recognition Services
Following are the perks that AI-based OCR technology provides to businesses:
- Using this software can minimize human resources and thus reduce manual efforts. It is cost-effective as well i.e. cuts the extra operational costs
- OCR technology enables the companies to focus on tasks that require their attention as time and efforts saved from manual work can be used in any other more productive and creative work
- Reduces the chances of error in the process as managing the data entering manually with the help of human hand have the probability of inaccuracy of the results. Cutting down on manual work can mitigate the chances of inaccuracy in the final result
Key Takeaways
Optical character recognition can be deployed to fetch information from paper-based documents and transform it into a machine-readable format. The extracted information can then be converted into a searchable form. Traditional ways of extracting data were tedious and cost companies a lot of money. Automated OCR technology has eased the work for businesses by reducing human involvement in the process. Multiple businesses such as banks, the health sector, and tourism are using this advanced technology in order to offer their consumers the best possible solutions.