Pairing @UiPath and ABBYY for image capture within RPA
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
Andrew Rayner of UiPath presented at the ABBYY Technology Summit on robotic process automation powered by ABBYY’s FineReader Engine (FRE). He started with a basic definition of RPA — emulating human execution of repetitive processes with existing applications — and the expected benefits in high scalability and reduction in errors, costs and cycle time. RPA products work really well with text on the screen, copying and pasting data between applications, and many are using machine learning to train and improve their automated actions so that it’s more than the simpler old-school “screen scraping” that was dependent purely on field locations on the screen.
What RPA doesn’t do, however, is work with images; that’s where ABBYY FRE comes in. UiPath provides developers using their UiPath Studio the ability to OCR images as part of the RPA flow: an image is passed to FineReader for recognition, then an XML data file of the recognized data is returned in order to complete the next robotic steps. Note that “images” may be scanned documents, but can also be virtualized screens that don’t transfer data fields directly, just display the screen as an image, such as you might have with an application running in Citrix — this is a pretty important capability that is eluding standard RPA.
Rayner walked through an example of invoice processing (definitely the most common example used in all presentations here, in part because of ABBYY’s capabilities in invoice recognition): UiPath grabs the scanned documents and drops them in a folder for ABBYY; FRE does the recognition pass and creates the output XML files as well as managing the human verification step, including applying machine learning on the human interaction to continuously improve the recognition as we heard about yesterday; then finally, UiPath pushes the results into SAP for completing the payment process.
For solution developers working with RPA and needing to integrate data captured from images or virtualized screens, this is a pretty compelling advantage for UiPath.
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