Robotic process automation (RPA) can be the true antidote to manual, rote work, or it can be our worst nightmare if you listen to all the drama or the hype. RPA centers on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to apply human-like thinking to streamline a typically manually intensive process or activity; and whether we like it or not, it's here to stay. Take, for instance, the process of data extraction from documents such as invoices. Application of advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition can automate a significant amount of the job of data entry typically performed by clerks or specialized data entry staff. Interestingly, human effort is still involved with attaining the ability to hand off a process or task to a machine.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can be the true antidote to manual, rote work, or it can be our worst nightmare if you listen to all the drama or the hype. RPA centers on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to apply human-like thinking to streamline a typically manually intensive process or activity; and whether we like it or not, it's here to stay. Take, for instance, the process of data extraction from documents such as invoices. Application of advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition can automate a significant amount of the job of data entry typically performed by clerks or specialized data entry staff. Interestingly, human effort is still involved with attaining the ability to hand off a process or task to a machine.

These days, a lot of workers are worried about robots taking their jobs, but now robots are taking jobs that literally no one else was doing--like poring through every inch of people's dense expense reports. AppZen, a startup that provides automated auditing services, has just expanded its software, which can now not only read basic items on attached receipts, but also scan entire documents to look for clues about invalid charges. Anant Kale, the company's CEO, tells Fast Company that the new offering, called ReceiptIQ, can audit 100% of the expense reports that employees submit, spotting them for "accidental fraud . . . The upgrade required moving beyond optical character recognition to computer vision that can understand the entire receipt, such as recognizing company logos. Many hotels put their logos on receipts rather than spelling out their name, says Kale. ReceiptIQ analysis goes deeper by looking for context, such as whether car rental bills include a fuel service charge--a penalty for not returning the car with a full gas tank.

Every productivity strategy needs a solution for digitizing paper documents. Fortunately, that doesn't necessarily require you to plunk down hundreds of dollars on a desktop scanner. All you need to unlock them is the right app. The best scanning apps provide everything you need to manage your digital-document workflow: editing tools to clean up the scanned images, optical character recognition (OCR) so you can edit and search document text, and the ability to upload scans to your favorite note-taking app or cloud storage for anywhere access. You can invite friends and colleagues to comment on your scans in CamScanner.

Recently, Google added Try the API boxes on the product pages of each of its Cloud Machine Learning APIs: Cloud Vision API, Speech API and Natural Language API. Now anyone can instantly experience the power of Google's machine intelligence on their own images, voice and text. Let's see how it works. Using the label detection method of the API, Cloud Vision executes image content analysis on the uploaded image. Looks like Cloud Vision's machine intelligence is smart enough to understand not just the object, but also the context ("halloween," "holiday," "carving").

Microsoft's Office Lens app has let folks upload photos from their iOS and Android devices since April 2015. With integration in the latest Windows OS, though, they've also added support for Office 365 if your business or personal accounts use that instead. It's still got all the optical character recognition you've enjoyed with OneNote since 2013, meaning the text and figures are searchable once you've uploaded the images to OneDrive.

The ScanSnap S1300i from Fujitsu is the smallest multi-page double-sided ScanSnap scanner for one-button ease of use at the desk or on the road. Just stack up to 10 pages into the feeder and press the blue button. The S1300i features a powerful set of automated image processing functions including auto skew correction, auto orientation, and auto color detection -- all working behind the scenes so your scanned content looks great without effort. Scanning to the cloud lets you access your documents from just about anywhere. The unit is powered by USB or the included AC power cord.

ArXiv sanity clean for text-to-speech bookmark. How to use text-to-speech to create audio books and read science papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v R2b9d...

'Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, an ideal "intelligent" machine is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving". As machines become increasingly capable, facilities once thought to require intelligence are removed from the definition. For example, optical character recognition is no longer perceived as an exemplar of "artificial intelligence" having become a routine technology.

Scientists have discovered a way to reconstruct the images in a person's mind. In a new study, researchers concluded that it's possible to visualize a person's memory using only an fMRI machine and some machine learning software. For the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers showed 23 participants hundreds of faces while hooked up to an fMRI machine. While they were looking at the faces, an AI program was learning to associate their perception of certain features with different brain activity. Then, once the machine has learned which activity corresponds to which feature, the participants are shown a picture of a brand-new face, and the machine reconstructs it.