Year: 2021

Video: ABBYY Mobile Capture – Xamarin Plugin

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Watch a video to discover how you can create an iOS and/or Android OCR capturing app by using the ABBYY Mobile Capture Xamarin Plugin and Visual Studio.

Hello. Today I’d like to show you how we get started with our ABBYY Mobile Capture Xamarin Plugin. This plugin gives us the ability to use Visual Studio, to write an Android and or an iOS app that uses ABBYY’s Mobile Capture technology to ensure that we get a good quality image and perhaps even an image that we can extract some data from. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to extract the sample project. If you don’t have a sample project, feel free to reach out. We can provide that to you. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and extract it. Now, when I extract it, just because of some experience that I’ve had with this, I am going to shorten the name a little bit. And the reason why is because by the time we start adding some devices for simulators and such the file links can get pretty outside a standard Windows acceptable path. So what I’m going to do is just simply have this information and these files extracted to a specific folder.

Now that we have those extracted, you’ll see here, we have all of our project files here. I’m going to specifically look at the core API today. Within here, we have a sample project and that’s what we’re going to work on setting up today. Once we have our solution open, the one thing that we need to do right up front is make sure that we have a valid license. So what I’ll do is I’ll navigate to the assets folder and you can see here, our Mobile Capture License is not acceptable. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go ahead and make sure we supply that. Now, if you have a trial, you should have a trial license. If you already own the product, you should also have a license. I’m going to navigate to this folder.

And then once I’m at the folder here, I will have a Mobile Capture License we can use. Once we have the license located, we can just simply drag and drop that license over here. Now what we’ll do is we’ll go ahead and refresh our project just to make sure we have a valid license. You can see there. We now have a valid license.

Now that we have the license loaded, the first thing we need to do is set up a device that we will use for simulation. It could either be a simulated product like using a simulator within Visual Studio, or we can actually deploy in cases of iOS, we can deploy to a Mac computer as well. For today’s demo, we’re going to use an emulator or simulator. And one thing that we need to do is just make sure we set up a device here.

When we get our device manager set up here. What I’m going to do for today’s demo is we’re going to go ahead and add a new device. And I’m simply going to go ahead and pick “Pixel 3”. The important part is to match this OS. Now I happen to know the sample is already a Q 10.0 Sample. So just make sure that the sample that we’re working with matches this, and I’ll show you how to verify that here in one second. So as that’s being created, we just want to make sure that the Android version that’s targeted in our project matches the device that we built. Which it does. This is Q 10.0 And this is Q 10.0 as well.

And while we have our project properties open, let’s go ahead and look at the Android options. The only thing I’d note here is that we do want to look at the advanced options, and we just want to confirm that the supported architectures shown here are supported just depending on your device and your current environment for debugging. I’ve just found it easier that we just go ahead and at least initially for project development, we enable all the supported architectures.

Now that should put us in a position where we can go ahead and launch this project. What you’ll see here is I’ll go ahead and launch it. What will happen is an Android device. Simulator will come up on our screen. It will boot up and then our sample project will be ready for use. Once our emulator is ready, we will have the sample project automatically launched for us. We of course want to allow device access, at least in this instance. And we’re just for fun today, going to go ahead and find us an image. Now, this simulator is brand new. It is not anything that we don’t have images loaded on this phone. We have nothing on the phone. So what we’re going to go ahead and do is we’re going to go ahead and browse to a website and just take a screenshot real quick.

So now that we have a screenshot taken, now we have something in our gallery that we can select. All we need to do is click our little gallery button here. We now have a screenshot that we can use in the app. And you’ll see that’s what the software uses to perform OCR. Now, this is a very basic sample where we’re looking to extract information or text on the document. We can obviously control imaging with this document. Imaging ensures that we get a good quality document that is available and acceptable for OCR use.

Just for fun, I’m going to go ahead and select that sample again. And you’ll see here, we have just a few basic imaging options: rotating, cropping. But the interesting part here is that we can also examine the document for OCR quality. So the software will be able to tell us what characters on the document it was able to read, and we can make some intelligent decisions with some of that detail. So this is our sample Xamarin project, a very, very powerful onboarding tool for capturing documents. Making sure we get high quality images that allow us to perform some sort of downstream OCR step. Thanks so much for listening to this video.

Music- “‘Engineered to Perfection’ performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock”.

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Some Ways that Microsoft 365 Administrators can Protect Against Business Email Compromise (BEC)

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Overview: According to the FBI, business email compromise (BEC) is one of the most financially damaging online crimes.[1] It is also perhaps one of the tricks that even the savviest businessperson may fall for. Email account compromise (EAC) is a closely related tactic. This article examines some ways in which Microsoft 365 administrators can lower

ABBYY FlexiCapture 12 Video – Reporting Service

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Learn about how you can use the Reporting Service to gather important information and statistics about documents going through the ABBYY FlexiCapture workflow.

Hello. Today I’d like to share with you our FlexiCapture Reporting Service. This Reporting Service is really a background service that captures information and statistics about documents that are going through a workflow of ABBYY FlexiCapture. Now after installing the service, one of the important things to do is to visit the Event logging mode page in the Administration and Monitoring Console. Within this section, you’ll see that we have a URL. We need to provide the URL specifically to the Reporting Service, and then FlexiCapture will post and make calls to this Reporting Service URL to capture the data.

There’s really not much to see from a FlexiCapture perspective, except the type of data that we extract. And to do that you’ll notice that when we install the FlexiCapture Reporting Service, we establish a database. That database is where FlexiCapture will warehouse the information that we want to collect. We can get items down to a document level, so we can see all sorts of things from the document itself and page count and those sorts of things to even field level specific information, or even deeper, a little bit page level information. So we can get quite interesting here. We obviously, as you can see, capture information about a user interaction, also suspicious fields, and when fields and pages are changed. So there’s a lot of data that FlexiCapture is capturing in this Reporting Service.

Now, one of the cool ways to kind of start seeing and glancing at this data is that we have sample reports. If you don’t have access to these sample reports, please reach out to us. We’ll provide them to you. But to kind of give you an idea of what these reports look like, I’ll share them with you quickly. So we obviously have information now that we can look at that database. We have information about Page Classification. We have information about Document Type Classification and statistics around that. We can obviously get Field Level Information. So what fields did we extract? What was the confidence levels? Those sorts of things. We could even get down nitty gritty to the types of information that we’ve extracted as well. And then of course we have what we call Verification Quality. So why did these documents need verification? Who reacted to them? What were the errors? What were the values that we’ve extracted? What business rules were violated? And how the software assembled? So there’s so much information that this Reporting Service can capture for us, but it’s just now being able to understand what we have access to. So this has been a unique addition to FlexiCapture because it really does give us visibility from the data.

Now, one of the more important things I will call out is that as documents start processing through the Reporting Service, if you want field level specific information, you will need to go into your project and you will open your document definition. When you open your document definition, the fields over on the right side, will need to tell the software whether or not you’re going to track them as an Indexed Field. Indexed Fields are the values that will save to the database otherwise information about the field specific data will not be extracted, but using this property will enable us to get that specific information about the field.

So I’ll show you an example. If I query our document field table here, you’ll see, because I have Last Name on my document definition as an Indexed Field, the software will now capture the value. Otherwise it will not capture the value for us. It will note that we found it, but it will not provide the value unless it’s an Indexed Field. So that’s just one important thing to remember about the Reporting Service. But otherwise you have access to a ton of data that gives you the ability to look at your workflow and figure out ways that you can start making good business decisions on how to increase things like straight through processing and also looking at the number of staff you have involved in a process as well.

So very important information here that’s provided to you from the FlexiCapture Reporting Services. Not much to see on the FlexiCapture side, but really the item that I want to share with you today is all about backend data. And the fact that we have access to all of this data that gives us the ability to make intelligent business decisions. Thanks so much for watching this video.

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Release of New FlexiCapture Reporting Service

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The ABBYY FlexiCapture 12 R3 Update 1 includes a new component called the ABBYY FlexiCapture Reporting Service which is compatible with FlexiCapture 12 R3 Update 1 and later (and is not compatible with previous versions). This service collects information about the quality of document processing, the performance of the software and overall effectiveness of FlexiCapture.

ABBYY Vantage Video – Integration with Automation Anywhere™

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Watch a video to learn how you can integrate an Automation Anywhere™ Bot with the document processing skills of ABBYY Vantage.

Hello. Today I’d like to share with you a video about how we do an integration between Automation Anywhere and ABBYY Vantage. Once again, being able to take advantage of two best in class platforms from RPA to OCR, with classification and extraction, and really mend them into one full process, giving us the best of both worlds. And what you see in front of us is an Automation Anywhere Bot, and this Bot is responsible for interacting with the Vantage Web Service API to pass documents and take advantage of those skills that we have within ABBYY Vantage.

So what I wanted to show you is my dual setup here, where I can show you the bot visually, but also the steps specifically called out for us. And really this is the high list of steps. Is we’re going to obtain an Access Token. We’re going to go get some skills. Specifically, look for a specific skill that we want to interact with. Then we’re going to process the files. We’re going to upload some files to ABBYY Vantage. We’re going to get the transaction information back. We’re going to download the result file and convert that Json to a CSV.

So it’s fairly simple. In fact, what I’ll do is I’ll go ahead and run the bot so that we can see what happens. I’m going to hit run. And we’re going to have a couple of message boxes that load up for us just to kind of show us the different pieces of the interaction.

This would be our Access Token. This would be our SkillID. Then we have what’s called a TransactionID within ABBYY Vantage. And once again, these message boxes are just for information purposes so that we can track how the bot is progressing. All right, now the documents have been fully processed. So what you’ll see is we have this information extracted to a CSV file. If I double click that CSV file, I will have the results that I’ve gotten back from ABBYY Vantage here within my CSV file here in Excel. So this is just one example of exporting that Json query to something that’s usable for us downstream. It gives us the ability to obviously take that Json, and do anything we want with it. Whether it’s use it within the bot, whether it is passing it to another process downstream, or consuming that Json through some other method.

So the cool part is here that we have that all working as one seamless process, but let’s dive into the bot for just a few seconds here. It’s very simple. It’s just a REST Web Service Action that we’re using within Automation Anywhere. So we’re going to go ahead, for example, post our API to Access Token Request. We’re going to go ahead and extract the data from the response and we will then get an Access Token. So if we wanted to take a look at the Access Token Request, we can pull that up here within our variable. We have a variable where we store all of these specific calls. And you can see here, we’re applying this here to the endpoint. We actually have two different URLs that we’re using. So we use the URL base of the URL, and then we use an Access Token amended to it so that we can keep those as two separate locations.

Obviously then we will extract our Access Token. Now, an interesting part here is that we want to look for a specific skill. So what we do is we can obviously get the skills through a web service post, and then we can extract the specific Web Service ID of that skilled name that we’re looking to interact with Vantage here. So what we’ve done is we’ve asked Vantage to give us a list of skills. And now we’re specifically looking for a specific skill that we will interact with downstream. So we’ll store that SkillID and a variable, which we will then use when we process new transactions.

Now we have a DLL that we use to kind of package that document and pass that over to Vantage. You’ll see, it’s actually fairly simple. All we’re doing is we’re giving it a file. We’re giving it the Web Service URL and the Header, and we’re passing it to Vantage, just programmatically, making sure that we combine all of those beautifully. But then the rest of this is once again, interacting directly with the API to get the transaction information. We actually pass a document to Vantage, and then we ask Vantage to give us the response and then we loop until it happens until we actually get a formal response. And we put a delay of five seconds here. There’s a number of different ways to do this, but this is just a very basic way to show you that we’re passing a document. And then we’re just pulling for status periodically until we get the status that we expect to receive.

Now, when we pass a document to Vantage, the important part to know is that every transaction gets logged. So we can literally see what’s going on in that transaction. We have all of the logs you can see from top to bottom, where we came from. You know, bottom is the very process starting and then it goes through a number of steps where then the workflow is completed.

Within our skill, the one thing I will tell you is our document processing skill has an output within it. And you can see here, we’re telling the software to don’t provide an output, which by default is an FTP output, but we’re just saying don’t provide one. Instead, we’ll use our Automation Anywhere actions to pull the results. So that’s what we have here. This would be a typical setup of a Process Skill, where we’re going to provide a document and we’re going to classify and extract, and then we’re going to output it, but just know here, if we’re just interacting with the Web Service API, we want to make sure that we have this first option selected here.

And then of course we will pull. And that’s what I was sharing with you here on the Automation Anywhere side. We will pull for that document periodically until we get a proper status. That means we’ve extracted the data. And then from here, we can download the result file, which is the Json file and we can convert that to anything we want. In our demo we’ve converted it to CSV, but you can obviously do all sorts of exciting things with that Json. So this is an overall solution that gives us the best in class of both worlds from RPA to OCR and classification and extraction. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions on this, please reach out. Thank you so much.

“Automation Anywhere” is a trademark/service mark or registered trademark/service mark of Automation Anywhere, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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ABBYY Vantage Video – Getting Started

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Watch a video to discover the basics about how to get started with ABBYY Vantage, an AI based cognitive services data extraction platform.

Hello. Today I’d like to share with you ABBYY Vantage. The unique part of this platform is that it’s an easy and quick way to implement an OCR extraction process. Now, what you see in front of us is kind of our home screen. When we log in, this is where we go. On the left is our menu of our different options that we have. And on the middle is the content. Always the content about that specific menu item. And then on the right is an action screen, which always tells us what we can do in that context of that screen. Now, the document screen here is actually our sandbox. I’ll come back to this in a minute, but the sandbox is where we can upload documents and kind of see right now, right in front of us, the classification and extraction results.

One of the more important parts about ABBYY Vantage is understanding skills. We have three types of skills. We can teach the software about how to classify a document. Now, when we say classify, we mean, how do we determine the document type? One of the ways that we do that is by literally uploading samples of documents so that the software can see and start feeling what we call variants or classes of those documents. We have what are called document skills. So once the software knows a document type, we want to typically extract information on that document. And so that’s what a document skill does is we can upload samples in using machine learning, literally just lasso data and teach the software where information is found on documents that are either structured or completely unstructured.

And then lastly, we have a process skill. A process skill gives us the ability to bring everything together so we can allow the software to use classification skills and document skills, and literally map out a business process. In fact, I’ll show you one, just to give you an idea of what I mean. So here is a process skill. We have an input and we have certain actions or properties about that input. We have a classify step of the activity of the process. We have an extraction activity, we have some routing decisions, and then we have an output. And this is kind of bringing every one of those skills together to give us the ability to see our business process.

Here on the left, then going back to the menu is a manual review screen. So within this process, we can make certain conditions and decisions about when we send items for manual human in the loop review. And then of course we have an administration section here.

Let me go back however, to a couple of things that I didn’t share with you about skills. You have a skills catalog, which is where all of your skills live. You have a skills monitor, which tells you about the interaction of the skills. So you literally can see statistics about documents that are flowing through a specific skill. You can see throughput and you can see if items are lining up in a queue and you can see how long those skills are taking to run. And you can literally see event logs about every single transaction that takes place and this is typically helpful when we’re debugging and kind of seeing throughput expectations. So skills monitor is a more of an administrative review of how our skill is processing. Is it efficient and what do we need to do to make sure that that skill is rock solid? And then of course we have our skills designer. Remember I said there are three skills documents, classification, and process. Once again, the document skill is all about extraction. Teaching the software about extraction. Classification is teaching the software how to recognize different types of documents and then process skill is bringing it all together. So I just wanted to share this platform with you. This is a very unique opportunity for us to onboard a OCR extraction or classification process within minutes, and look forward to diving into this software with you. Thank you so much.

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ABBYY Vantage Video – Creating a Classification Skill

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Watch a video on how to create your first Classification Skill in ABBYY Vantage using the Classification Skill Designer.

Hello. Today I’d like to share with you how we create our first Vantage Classification Skill. So I’m logged into Vantage. The first thing I’ll do is go to our Skills Designer and create a Classification Skill. We will give it a proper name. And we will create it. One of the first important things to understand about a Classification Skill is that we have this concept called Classes. Classes are the different variants or types of this specific document that we have. And in this case, I have a direct deposit form. So what I’ll do is I’ll create a class. I have a form from a fake company called ACME, and then another company called Custom Kitchens.

Now I’ll just share with you an example of this direct deposit form. This is from the company ACME. So I want to tell the software, what ACME looks like. What the different styles of forms are. And then I have another one here for Custom Kitchens of Bayshore. And this is another form. Now the idea with classification is that we can teach the software through samples, how to recognize these different classes separately. So in this case, what I’m going to do is upload a few samples of each type. I’m just going to drag and drop them. And I’m going to move on to the next one. The software will asynchronously add those to that class. So in other words, I can work while the software is still learning and applying those different documents. In this case, I’m going to go ahead and upload these other samples to this other class.

So now that these are uploaded, you’ll notice that the train button on the far bottom, right, is now activated. I have the ability to train the software with those documents. Now that the training is completed, I can move on to our results tab and we can see statistics about the documents. So we can see the accuracy level. We can see the number of classes. We can see the documents that were used for those classes. We can even upload additional documents. So if I had another document that we want to upload, say this blank document, I would have the ability to go ahead and upload and use those documents.

The next step here is we have the ability to publish this Classification Skill. We can give it a name and description, some keywords so that we can find it as we search and even upload some demo documents. Once we’re done, we will hit publish. You can find that Classification Skill in your Skills Catalog under the Classification Skills section. So you can see here. Here’s the first one we just created together. And now you’ve created your very first Classification Skill within ABBYY Vantage. Congratulations!

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ABBYY Vantage Video – Creating a Document Skill

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Watch a video to learn how to create a Document Skill with ABBYY Vantage’s Document Skill Designer.

Hello. Today I’m going to show you how we create our very first Document Skill within ABBYY Vantage. Now, when we’re logged into Vantage, what we want to do is go to our Skill Designer and we want to select “Document Skill”. We can give the skill a name and then we can proceed. The first thing we want to do is upload some samples of the documents that we want to teach the software, how to extract. So I will do that. I’m going to upload two different samples. In practice, you would want multiple samples and potentially multiple samples of even the same format, if that’s where you’re going. So we will upload for this demo, just two different samples, but in practice, we would have multiples. We will continue moving down our action screen.

So we’ve uploaded documents. Now we want to label and create some business rules. This is where we tell the software where the information is on the document that I want to extract. It’s actually very, very simple. You can see the types of fields that we can extract here. We can do tables. We can do barcodes. We can do checkboxes. We can group elements. And of course we can grab any text on the document. What I’m going to do is I’m not going to touch anything besides lassoing the field for the sample that I want to extract. When I click that, you’ll see a new field is populated here on the right. For the sakes of this demo, I’m just going to select a few different fields. And the software will add the fields here. I will go ahead and give them a proper name.

The other cool part about Vantage is we get the ability to group fields. So just for fun, I thought I’d show you how we can group, for example, the banking information. So what I’ll do is I’ll click the “Add Group” here. I can rename the group. And as you’ll see, I can click to create an item. And here, once again, we just lasso the fields. And so what we can do here is rename the fields.

The other thing that we can do at this point is obviously we have checkboxes on this form, which are going to be pretty key for the type of data that we want to extract on this document. And so what I can do is I can click the “Add Checkbox” or “Checkmark” field. The software will put this checkmark here, and now I need to teach it where it’s found. So I’m going to click it and I’m just going to tell the software it’s located here. And then I’m going to give it a proper name. And I will do the same thing for the savings account. Once again, we will name that properly.

One of the important things to do when you use a checkbox is to tell the software, which one is the properly checked value. So in today’s document here, I’m going to unselect checking just so the software is known by my clicking, which one is properly checked.

Now that I’ve defined the fields for one document, I can do it for the next document. And so what I’ll do, even though the document looks different, that’s okay. We’re going to teach the software by clicking here on the right where to find this information. And all we do is we click in the field and then we click the text on the document. Here we got our banking information field.

And then remember on the checkboxes, we just want to teach the software where they’re found. So we click and point. And then the only thing we want to do last on the checkbox is make sure the one that’s selected on the document is properly selected on the form. So since the checking is the one selected on the document, we’re going to keep that selected there.

Now that I’ve trained my two documents. And in reality, we would want more, but for today’s demo, we will move on to the next available action, which is training. I will click the training button and eventually what will happen is we’ll see some results here in the results tab. Now we can look at the results tab for these pair of documents. We have the fields listed the banking information listed. We can tell that the software can find which correct fields and which ones are not correct. In this case, they’re all correct. These are pretty basic forms; however, so we would expect that. And we can see specifically which documents were correct and if there were incorrect findings on the form, we would have an incorrect option here as well.

Just like we do with any other skill, the very last action that we have is to publish. Before I publish, I want to show you one more thing about every field that you have. If I go back to the editor, I just wanted to inform you that there is this little gear. This is our field options. The options that we have on a field are to make it a required field. And we also have advanced properties. And then we can of course create business rules. Today we’re not going to talk about business rules, but I will click the button just so you get an idea of what a business rule is. We can look up information. We can merge fields. We can compare fields. We can even script fields here, but what I really wanted to call your attention to is how do we zone in and teach a software about the type of data for that field? Because not all data is just text. We have different data types that are supported. We can also mark fields as required fields or key fields or dimension fields. And we can provide more context around that if you have questions. We can also set a maximum length and sometimes more importantly define the type of data that we want to extract off of the field using a regular expression. And there is a regular expression editor. So this is how we really zone in and make sure that we’re teaching the OCR about the type of data that we expect to find in that field.

Once again, the last thing we’ll do here is publish. I’m going to go ahead and publish our skill, and that will take us back to the skills catalog, which again is where we live to find all of our skills.

And I hope you’ve enjoyed this video, creating your very first Vantage Document Skill. Thank you.

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