Why Our RPA Implementations Need an OCR Replacement Immediately

In an IDC survey, 76 per cent of respondents reported that the inability to analyse current data inhibits their ability to take advantage of business. Organizations that analyse all relevant data and deliver actionable information will achieve an extra $430 billion in productivity gains over their less analytically oriented peers by 2020. 85% of this data today is unstructured. This volume is projected to increase to 93% by 2020. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR), we will be woefully equipped to make sense of this data.

OCR is a 20-year-old technology which uses zoning and character lookup to read images. Typically, as it runs into a character, it compares the character to a font library. If it does not find it in the library, the data capture process stalls.  As a result, all downstream processes including Robotics Process Automation (RPA) come to a grinding halt. Being character dependent limits OCRs capabilities in deciphering structured data. When used, OCR would require 100% manual checking which defeats the whole purpose of automation.

AntWorks' Cognitive Machine Reading technology marries a number of technologies like pattern recognition, machine learning and natural language modelling to enable intelligent, multi-format data ingestion. Being a pattern recognition engine rather than a character recognition engine, enables 99.9 %confidence on recalled data-confidence that we will need to be armed with to handle the upcoming deluge of data.