In today's digital world, documents and Emails are crucial in the day to day operations of any business.
However, most of the content in emails and documents is unstructured which makes it time consuming at times to process the information and identify important information required. Many professionals spend several hours a day going through unstructured documentation and extracting important information manually.
It is a common practice to organise content in structured form through web forms or document templates but many times it is not possible due to the complexity of the content or sometimes it is easier to send unstructured documents. This is where AI provides a solution. AI can help process documents faster through the following ways:
Keyword Extraction:
Keywords like names, company names, reference numbers are important while processing any document or email. Often these keywords are embedded deep in the body of the document and it can take some time to find them as these keywords have no labels or identifiers. This is where AI can be trained to identify important keywords from text. Consider the following example of an email :
"Hi Mark,
I would like to follow up on the discussion we had at our last meeting about ABC ltd. I had further discussion with Tracy and Anish about how to proceed further with our engagement. We have worked with ABC before and the previous records can be pulled from case 1234567 . We also have a similar case for NNN LLP where we can get more information. Can you please also check with Charles as he was working on that project before ?
Regards,
Jamie"
If you see the underlined words in the email above you can see that these keywords help to identify the context of the email quickly. But, identifying these keywords require a person to go through the email which can be time consuming if they have several emails in a day. Using AI these keywords can be extracted instantly which helps processing the email faster saving time for other proudctive activities.
Text Summarization
For people with a busy work schedule it is a lot easier if the contents of documents and email can be summarized to give the required information quickly. Often documents are long and tedious to read. In our mind we are also summarizing the document when we are going through it. AI can do this job of summarizing documents which can save time and effort spent going through long documents and emails.
Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)
ICR is to used to identify handwritten text in scanned documents. These scanned documents could include important personal data which is received by organisations in various sectors like legal, finance and public sector. The use of AI in ICR not only helps to identify the keywords in scanned documents but also understand the entire context of the document. This can help to convert handwritten text to digital form.Some examples where ICR can be used effectively are Invoices, Contracts, Forms and Statements.
It is also important to know that AI needs to be trained on relevant data before it can give the desired results. The accuracy of AI models depends on the data they are trained upon. In the long term, AI will definitely be an important part of document processing.
If you need help to automate document processing using AI please get in touch.