If expert predictions are to be believed, a whopping 80 percent of enterprise workload across the globe will soon be shifted onto the Cloud. Talking about Cloud platforms that support these operational needs, at least forty percent of this share would be transferred to public platforms like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. It also means that workers will soon have to get familiar with working on such cloud-based platforms and rather become efficient at what they do. Even routine tasks like data extraction and entry will have to be automated on Cloud platforms.
However, it is quite logical to say that, Cloud or otherwise, manually handling data at such large scales is definitely illogical and hugely cumbersome. This is the reason why Cloud platforms are coming up with their own optical character recognition applications, and one such offering made public by them is the AWS Textract. The AWS cloud services are widely used and quite beneficial as well. But one can’t help pointing out the flaws and challenges in the Amazon OCR software. In this article, we shall critically analyze the Amazon OCR technology and see whether we have any alternative that can help us tide over these challenges effectively.
If the global popular opinion and the predictions made by experts are to be believed, we are soon moving towards “all Cloud” operations. Amazon AWS is undoubtedly the most popular cloud-based platform, offering a plethora of essential services like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Therefore, with such widespread acceptance for the platform and its services, its users can get hold of the Amazon AWS OCR as a simple add-on. When you compare it with several other companies dealing in OCR technology, the setup is much easier and more convenient for the end-user.
The AWS shared responsibility model is quite popular and well-known in the market. As all the services offered on this Cloud platform are aligned with the security regulations adopted by Amazon, even the OCR application is conformant to the same. So, issues like data breaches and misuse of confidential information are tackled quite well by the AWS Textract.
Invoices and bills usually have many different fields and headings under which data is added. The selection and extraction of custom fields from invoices for faster processing is a very important requirement for businesses today. It is therefore expected from any OCR software to support such selective data extraction in invoices particularly.
However, since AWS OCR does not provide accurate results for custom selection of specific fields, it is definitely a big challenge to automate invoice processing using the Amazon OCR service. GST number, transaction dates, due dates, or bank account information are some fields that one essentially requires for invoice processing. If there are any errors in the extraction, even after having artificial intelligence at work, it could cause some serious problems for the business.
Optical character recognition cannot be seen as a single solution that daily operations would require. With the development of robotic process automation, software bots are being created that can lift the data output generated by the OCR software and then use it for whatever purpose required. But since many businesses opt for third-party integrations in such cases, the Amazon OCR API does not serve as a viable alternative. This is because Textract does not allow such integrations, limiting the sharing of data greatly.
Even though we expect the update to come pretty soon, at present, the Amazon OCR does not support vertical text extraction. You must have seen how professional documents commonly have text presented in a vertical direction, invoices being the most prominent example. Therefore, the use of the AWS Textract can limit your organization’s ability to extract data from such documents.
Using the optical character recognition service on the AWS platform means that you will first have to transfer all your documents to the cloud. Many organizations are still skeptical about this migration, citing issues like a threat to confidentiality and data breach.
Even though AWS is one of the most secure cloud platforms, such apprehensions do remain in the market. Also, with newer technologies like Edge Computing taking over, cloud computing can be replaced very soon. Hence, investing in a totally cloud-based OCR solution may not be very appealing to several organizations.
The biggest selling point of the Amazon OCR technology is the incorporation of artificial intelligence methods. However, even by leveraging the benefits of AI, these challenges do exist, which you can notice very easily by taking an Amazon OCR demo. KlearStack fills this void by effectively managing all challenges. Ours is not an exclusively Cloud-based tool, making it an all-encompassing solution for data extraction needs.
KlearStack is the best OCR software for automated invoice processing, extracting data from invoices selectively. KlearStack’s OCR tool also supports RPA, being part of a complete montage for process automation in industries. To book a free KlearStack demo, contact us today.
