The business processes are transforming quickly in the past couple of decades. In the past companies used billboards and paper brochures for advertisement, but now they are doing digital marketing campaigns. The ways of business communication with other businesses and customers have also transformed. The Digital revolution has brought advanced and relieved means of how a business will interact. Now businesses take customer feedback through online surveys instead of physical meetups.

To comply with the modern technological demands businesses should choose more efficient and convenient procedures.  One of the major problems businesses were facing is paper working and manual data processing. The solution for this is the use of Optical Character Recognition. 

Optical Character Recognition

It is a technology that is used to digitize paper documents into machine editable format called optical character recognition (OCR). It automates hard documents by converting them into soft form.

Still, in many businesses, there are employees who insert the data manually into the computer. Optical character recognition can help these businesses by giving them all the necessary benefits while saving resources. OCR uses (AI) and (NLP) for data extraction. The accuracy is much higher because of these two technologies.

Let’s understand OCR in a better way with an example:

A person goes to a restaurant and finds that the menu is not in his native language. Also, there is not any translator nearby, and he can type the words on the translation app.  The problem doubles in this case, OCR can help in this case. He can use an OCR mobile app, cloaks a picture of the menu and that’s it. OCR will extract data through the image, now the person has just had to put the data into the transaction app, and he will be given the translation in seconds. Luckily translation apps are using OCR, making the process quicker. It means the translated data will be on the screen after just clicking the image in real-time.

OCR for Businesses

In the case of a bank that has to deal with thousands of documents daily. Normally the bank has to enter data by typing it into the computer. It can use OCR to convert that paper into the soft form which will completely eradicate manual intrusion in the process.

Here is the procedure how business can utilize OCR:

Test

A business has to train the OCR software’s AI, it will be done by just uploading a document to the software. Then identify each area in the image and name it accordingly. Like defining a specific area as an account number or address.

Train

For training, a second image will be uploaded and the results will be checked. If the results are accurate, it means it has trained enough. If not, repeat the testing process more than once.

Extract

At this phase, the data will be extracted from the documents by uploading images to the software. A database of images can be uploaded to the software at one time, OCR will extract the data and put it in the required format e.g. sheet or document file.

OCR is very helpful for the identity verification industry, the businesses that are providing these services can use OCR to accelerate the IDV process. Now a person just has to upload the image of his identity document. OCR will capture the data for additional processing. Before that, the image was sent to the IDV office, and an employee manually verifies the data.

Conclusion

Businesses can reduce the costs and time span of manual data entry by integrating OCR into their systems. Through this, the workflow will be more managed and well-organized. OCR technology uses AI and NLP, there are very small possibilities of errors. The software is matured sufficiently that it can retrieve data from all types of documents. Handwritten documents can cause a problem of word understanding for humans. OCR can extract data from handwritten documents also. Some banks require the written consent of the customer to open his account. OCR will assist banks in this case by extracting information from handwritten documents robustly.

Businesses should opt for OCR services to streamline their processing giving the best services to their customers. The data entry process will be automated complying with the modern technological demands.