8.1 Text Extraction

This topic provides the information about the Text Extraction.

Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the process of digitizing documents and extracting text from them. Widely used as a form of data entry from scanned documents – Here the text is first scanned, analyzed, and is finally translated into character codes. This machine-encoded text can be easily searched and edited electronically.

OCR has greatly improved the process of data entry. The need for the documents to be scanned is on a constant rise as it enables these documents to be viewed conveniently when required. The most popular application of OCR is Data entry for business documents, e.g. ID card, driving license, passport, cheque, invoice and salary slip.

Benefits of OCR:

1. 100% Text-searchable Documents - One of the huge advantages of OCR data processing is that it makes the digitized documents completely text searchable. This helps professionals to quickly lookup numbers, addresses, names, and various other parameters that differentiate the document being searched.
2. Reduced Cost - Besides helping an organization in cutting down the cost of hiring manpower for data extraction, it also helps in reducing several other costs like printing, copying, shipping charge, etc.
3. Reduced Errors - It resolves the problem of data loss and inaccuracy and helps in reducing errors.
4. More Storage Space -The lesser the documents, the larger space. Organizations have always wanted to take the ‘Paperless’ approach and OCR just makes it possible. Also, the expenses of file cabinets are saved with this approach.
5. Ready Availability - By scanning the information of documents through OCR, the data can be made available in several different places. One can carry it in a USB drive and retrieve the wanted information with just a few clicks.
6. Superior Data Security - Data security is of utmost importance for any organization. Paper documents are easily prone to loss or destruction. However, this is not the case with data that is scanned, analyzed, and stored in digital formats. Furthermore, access to these digital documents can also be minimized to prevent mishandling of the digitized data.
7. Massively Improves Customer Service - Several inbound contact centers often provide information that their customers seek. While some call centers provide customers with the information they need, others will have to quickly access certain personal or order-related information of the customers to process their requests. Quick data accessibility becomes extremely important in such cases. This helps in systematically storing and retrieving the documents digitally at blazing speeds. With this, the waiting time is drastically reduced for the customers, thereby improving their experience.