How do machines help you recognize letters and convert them into electronic documents? You don’t need to include much-advanced computer science in the traditional OCR process, but Gleematic, goes a step further.

What is Traditional OCR?

Traditionally, humans have been just “eye-balling” data from invoices and other documents to be entered manually into I.T. systems. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is very time-consuming. To solve this problem, new technologies have been developed, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which can easily retrieve this information and extract it from the documents. OCR can retrieve information from an invoice, on which you must mark out the information to be extracted. 

Although setting up OCR to get data from these documents sounds simple, the drawback of OCR is that it is very rigid. You have to set up strict rules by programming, to define positions of data points. This is not feasible when there are many types of invoices and documents that vary from company to company.

Save to Your Reading List: Most Frequently Asked Questions About OCR

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) for text recognition?

A.I. is “the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.” (According to Oxford Languages)   Today, examples that come closest to humans are computer vision, speech recognition, and language processing. It also has a term called “human-like intelligence,” a capability that AI has to mimic human brain skills and mimic the way humans think. AI requires data to be used as knowledge so that one could say that AI was previously trained on the basis of this knowledge.

Then which one is better, Traditional OCR or A.I. empowered data extraction?

Actually, there is nothing wrong or right in this case. It depends on the type of documents to be processed, the resources that are available, and the need for the system. OCR works for certain industries that may only need to process large volumes of a few fixed types of documents. In other cases this AI technology can load various kinds of invoices, the advantage is that you don’t need to manage a lot of things for various types of documents but sometimes it is still difficult to implement.

The two technologies can be combined in different ways, such as by using a combination of traditional OCR and artificial intelligence (AI). Both technologies can be used in different ways, combining OCR and AI to process many different types of documents, combining both advantages while maintaining their strengths and weaknesses such as accuracy and speed.

The interesting thing about Gleematic is that everything can be done with the basic system they have developed, a robot that can do all the human work and carry out the work process in a way that is very much in line with current needs. You can spend more time filling out recurring invoices for your business every day, all with Gleematic.