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.

Natural language processing (NLP) is quickly becoming one of the foundational big data technologies that will allow healthcare to move forward with complex analytics, according to a series of market reports predicting significant growth for NLP products over the next few years. As healthcare organizations seek new strategies for extracting insights from unstructured data from electronic health records, Internet of Things devices, imaging studies, and elsewhere, they will create an NLP marketplace worth $2.65 billion by 2021, says ReportsnReports. "The market is growing rapidly because of the huge surge in clinical data, increasing use of connected devices, and evolving consumer needs," the report says. Natural language processing may play an instrumental role in precision medicine, predictive analytics, population health management, clinical decision support, and EHR documentation improvement. The NLP market is divided into several segments: interactive voice response and speech analytics technologies, optical character recognition (OCR), automatic coding, text analytics, and pattern and image recognition.

Renee Scholato says her dog, Tank, is just friendly, though she acknowledges the animal sometimes escapes from her home and did jump on the carrier. But she says the dog wasn't attacking or biting. The Postal Service has told residents that mail won't be delivered to Scholato's block in Washington, Pennsylvania, until the dog is properly restrained. Until then, those residents can pick up their mail at the post office, where it will be held for 30 days. Neighbor Brenda Dogle says she's upset about being punished for someone else's dog, saying neighbors "have to suffer because of one house."

The Postal Service has told residents that mail won't be delivered to Scholato's block in Washington, Pennsylvania, until the dog is properly restrained. Until then, those residents can pick up their mail at the post office, where it will be held for 30 days.

Austria based ANYLINE, the leading OCR Optical Character Recognition) technology provider for mobile devices, is solely focused on fast and accurate text recognition. Whether reading text across a room, a license plate on a car, or a gas meter in a manufacturing plant, the ANYLINE technology is able to deliver a fast and robust alternative to inputting data via voice recognition, typing, or button scrolling. This type of data import is still difficult to accomplish, as it requires a higher processor power and camera resolution. ANYLINE will now leverage the ... Read more

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").