By Nizra Thajudeen

Data is integral to any organization, providing valuable insights and patterns that inform critical decision-making. Yet, many organizations still rely on labor-intensive, time-consuming processes to extract unstructured data, images, and text from documents, often leading to inaccuracies. 

Simplifying your paperwork! 

Azure AI Document Intelligence (formerly known as Azure Form Recognizer) is an AI service that is powered by advanced machine learning algorithms which is used to extract insights and data from almost all types of documents. It can extract text, key-value pairs, tables and structures from documents easily and accurately. Organizations and individuals can use this service to extract data from unstructured documents, gain insights and analyze their documents easily. 

The 3 types of models 

Azure AI Document Intelligence offers three types of models for various use cases.  

1. Document Analysis Model: This model uses Azure AI OCR capabilities to extract text, tables, select marks and document structure from forms and documents to be used by the organization. This enables organizations to automate compliance checks, contract management and risk assessment processes more effectively by identifying entities, relationships and key concepts of various types of documents.  

2. Prebuilt Models: These are a range of prebuilt AI models that are trained to be used out of the box to perform tasks such as, receipt recognition, invoice processing and form understanding. The following are few of the prebuilt models that are available currently in Azure AI Document Intelligence.  
   • Invoice Model: Analyzes invoice text, extracts key information such as customer name, billing address, due date, and amount due from sales invoices, utility bills and purchase orders. 
   • Receipt Model: Analyzes and extract information such as merchant name, merchant phone number, transaction date, tax, and transaction total from receipts such as credit card, parking, hotel, transportation. 
   • ID Document Model: Analyzes and extracts information from identity documents such as passports, driver’s license and national identity cards. Extracts information such as name, address, date of birth, ID number. 
   • ID Document Model: Analyzes and extracts information from identity documents such as passports, driver’s license and national identity cards. Extracts information such as name, address, date of birth, ID number. 
   • US Tax Document Model: Extracts information from US tax documents such as W-2, 1098, 1098-E, 1098-T etc. Extracts information such as customer name, billing address, due date and amount due. 

3. Custom Models: Custom models are trained using your own datasets to extract distinct data from forms and documents specific to a use case. Standalone custom models can be combined to create composed models. Custom models can be classified into two such as, custom classification models and custom extraction models. 
   • Custom Classification Models: These models are trained to analyze a single or multifile documents to identify if any of the trained document types are contained within an input file.
   • Custom Extraction Models: Extracts specific data using a model that is trained with a custom labelled dataset. At least five labelled examples of the desired document to be extracted should be used to train the model.  

What sets it apart 

Using Azure AI Document Intelligence offers organizations and individuals many benefits to reap. Given below are some.  

• Accurately extract data: The Azure AI Document Intelligence models are trained with vast amount of data which results in improved accuracy so that it can extract information from documents with high precision and accuracy. This ensures that reliable data can be extracted, and errors can be minimized.  

• Streamline Document Processes: Repetitive document processing task such as data extraction, classification can be automated which will result in faster workflows and reduced manual effort.  

• Easier Data Analysis: Azure AI Document Intelligence enables organizations and individuals to get high level insights for many documents which can be used to identify patterns, trends and make decisions.  

• Scalability and flexibility: The service allows organizations to easily scale the document processing capabilities up or down depending on the needs of the organization. This allows flexibility in cost management of the service. 

• Security: Azure AI Document Intelligence ensures that sensitive information from documents is secured with proper standards and against unauthorized access. These builds trust with customers and stakeholders of the organization.  

Demonstrated success 

Azure AI Document Intelligence offers several useful services that organizations can leverage to build document processing solutions. Below are few organizations which have automated their document processing using this service.  

An organization specializing in integrating cloud services aimed to streamline their recruitment process. They faced challenges with manual data entry from forms collected at events. To address this, they implemented Azure Document Intelligence to automate form processing and ensure accurate data validation. 

Another organization specializing in tax services aims to enhance efficiency by leveraging Azure AI technologies. They utilize Azure AI Document Intelligence to extract crucial information such as texts and numbers from various tax documents like W-2 forms and 1099s. With scalability in mind, the company plans to expand the service to process over 30 million tax documents annually, improving their operational capabilities significantly. 

Conclusion 

Azure AI Document Intelligence is an easy, useful and scalable solution for document processing which can be used by organizations to streamline their documentation workflows. As businesses continue to evolve into leveraging AI services to automate many processes and workflows, all organizations which still uses manual processes to process documents and analyze them should consider document intelligence as a service which can increase their productivity and save time and cost by automating all documentation workflows.