Technical FAQs
Video playback has become an indispensable feature for today’s applications, reflecting the evolution of user preferences and the ubiquity of multimedia content in our digital age. As the consumption of video content surges, from tutorials, entertainment, and online courses to marketing materials and user-generated content, applications that offer smooth and versatile video playback capabilities cater directly to this user demand, enhancing engagement and retention rates.
Moreover, video communicates complex ideas efficiently, appeals to visual learners, and often enhances user experience with a richer, more immersive medium. In today’s highly competitive digital marketplace, integrating robust video playback functionality can be the deciding factor for an application’s success, ensuring that it meets contemporary user expectations and remains relevant in a video-centric digital ecosystem.
Introducing PrizmDoc Video Playback
Given the growing importance of video, the Accusoft engineering team has incorporated video playback into PrizmDoc’s growing feature set. PrizmDoc has long made it easy to integrate seamless document viewing into web-based applications, but the new video playback feature now allows developers to natively embed video functionality into their software. Thanks to PrizmDoc video playback, there’s no longer any need to host videos on external sites or rely upon vulnerable software plugins to incorporate videos into their application workflows.
The new video playback feature carries on PrizmDoc’s longstanding tradition of efficiency and outstanding performance by delivering high quality video content with minimal processing lags and accommodating multiple file formats. As with other PrizmDoc features, developers can quickly incorporate video playback through a simple API call. This makes it easy to roll out video features without having to build complex functionality from scratch.
Video Playback Benefits for Legal Applications
The legal industry stands to benefit immensely from the use of video playback. Incorporating video features into LegalTech applications allows legal teams to work more effectively and deliver better services to their clients. Here are just a few of the benefits of video playback for the legal industry:
Better Case Preparation
Incorporating video playback functionality into legal software revolutionizes the way lawyers work and offers them unprecedented advantages in case preparation and courtroom representation. With video playback, lawyers can revisit crucial deposition testimonies, witness interviews, or surveillance footage at the touch of a button, eliminating the need for extensive manual sifting through transcripts or notes. This visual evidence can be used to enhance comprehension, validate statements, and build more persuasive arguments.
With the growing use of virtual court proceedings, having integrated video playback capabilities ensures that legal professionals can present key evidence seamlessly, without toggling between multiple platforms. In essence, video playback in legal software streamlines processes, promotes meticulous case analysis, and provides lawyers with a compelling tool to bolster their arguments and client representation.
Improved Communication & Collaboration
Video playback in legal applications offers a transformative advantage by enhancing communication and collaboration among stakeholders. Unlike traditional methods, video captures the nuances of testimonies, allowing viewers to discern tone, emotion, and non-verbal cues often lost in written transcripts. This depth can be particularly evident when observing video depositions, where the demeanor and specific phrasing of witnesses are critical. Additionally, complex scenarios or events can be better understood when demonstrated through video, making it an indispensable tool for lawyers when explaining intricate case details to clients or colleagues.
This sensory-rich medium allows lawyers to brief their teams more effectively, reducing reliance on memory or textual notes, ensuring everyone remains aligned, and facilitating strategic discussions. Clients, too, benefit immensely. Video content can demystify the often-complex legal processes, empowering them with a clearer understanding of proceedings and making them active participants in their cases. Furthermore, when videos are shared with opposing counsel, it can improve transparency and potentially lead to faster resolutions by pinpointing areas of agreement or contention, thereby laying the groundwork for more informed negotiations.
Increased Efficiency
The integration of video playback within legal applications presents a notable advantage in increasing efficiency for legal professionals. In the past, the absence of built-in playback capabilities meant that lawyers often had to download and launch videos in separate external applications, causing interruptions in their workflow. Now, with the advent of direct video playback in the document viewing interface, there’s a seamless transition between reading textual documents and viewing related video content. This streamlined process ensures that lawyers and their teams no longer grapple with the cumbersome process of managing external video files, thereby saving valuable time.
By consolidating tasks within a singular interface, legal professionals can maintain their focus, review case materials more swiftly, and ultimately make more informed decisions without the constant shift between applications. The simplicity and efficiency offered by this integration not only optimize legal workflows but also enhance the user experience, leading to more agile and effective case management.
Enhance LegalTech Applications with PrizmDoc Video Playback
PrizmDoc’s new video playback feature delivers tremendous benefits for legal applications. This enhancement empowers legal professionals to integrate and access video content directly within their LegalTech software, eliminating the need for third-party platforms or external tools. As a result, users experience a swifter and more cohesive workflow, particularly when cross-referencing between legal documents and relevant videos. By consolidating these capabilities and minimizing associated costs, LegalTech software developers can channel their efforts and resources into innovating further, ensuring that their applications remain at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry landscape.
To learn more about how PrizmDoc’s video playback feature can benefit your LegalTech application, talk to one of Accusoft’s PrizmDoc specialists today.
Although it might feel as though time has been standing still for several months, 2020 is finally coming to an end. It’s been a year of unprecedented disruption for many industries, and insurance companies often found themselves struggling to adapt to change. Firms that had the foresight to invest in digital transformation backed by InsurTech solutions, however, proved more capable of meeting the moment and are now poised to thrive in 2021 and beyond.
As the new year approaches, it’s helpful to take a look back at some of the key trends that defined 2020 and created opportunities for innovative InsurTech applications. Understanding the pressures facing the insurance industry will also identify InsurTech projections to watch in the future.
5 Insurance Trends and InsurTech Projections
1. Remote Collaboration
No discussion of 2020 insurance industry trends would be complete without exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected organizations. According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, 48 percent of insurance executives agreed that the pandemic revealed how unprepared their business was for such a disruptive crisis. From the sudden transition to a remote workforce to a shift in risk adjustment factors across the market, insurers have had to scramble to adapt their operations and continue delivering quality services to clients.
With so many employees going remote and customers unable to meet with representatives in-person, organizations that made early investments in digital collaboration tools and automation software were better equipped to meet the challenges of 2020. The industry is expected to make tremendous investments in digital transformation in the upcoming year, whether it’s in powerful document editing and management software, file conversion tools, or secure communication channels that better facilitate true collaboration.
2. Customer Demographic Shifts
Prior to 2020, insurance customers tended to be older, with millennials purchasing life insurance policies at lower rates and often delaying home ownership until later in life. This trend seems to have reversed itself in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, with life insurance application activity growing twice as fast for people under 45 than those aged 45-49. Since many of these younger buyers are first-time applicants, it’s important for insurance agents and firms to make the process as streamlined and easy to navigate as possible.
According to a nationwide industry survey, just over 75 percent of independent insurance agents are age 50 or older and nearly 68 percent have more than 20 years of experience. Having such a long-tenured workforce poses challenges when it comes to implementing new processes and reaching out to potential customers with different needs and preferences than those of earlier decades. In order to remain competitive, however, firms must invest in the right InsurTech solutions to gather data that will give them a better picture of what insurance products and services younger customers will find attractive.
3. Robotic Process Automation
The shift to a remote workplace greatly disrupted traditional workflows. Without centralized offices, key insurance tasks like claims processing and document verification are much more difficult to perform manually. Organizations that had already invested in robotic process automation (RPA) to handle repetitive tasks were in a much better position to thrive in a remote landscape.
Insurance companies must be able to process a variety of forms during an application or a claim. Having automated InsurTech tools in place to quickly extract data from a variety of sources and carry information over from one form to another not only saves time, but also greatly reduces the risk of human error. For a remote workforce, automation software helps to consolidate complex workflows to eliminate version confusion and enhance collaboration.
4. Artificial Intelligence
Risk assessment and data analysis are crucial to the underwriting process. In a volatile economic environment, insurance firms are under more pressure than ever before to set the right premiums. Although the data is now readily available to make more accurate assessments, sorting through that information manually is difficult and time consuming.
As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, the scope of risk can change dramatically in a very short period of time. By deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze risk factors and review potential fraud claims quickly and accurately, insurers can create customized policies and provide more responsive service to their customers.
Implementing AI-driven algorithms as part of the underwriting and fraud analysis process will only be one part of the challenge facing firms in 2021. These powerful tools must have sufficient data in order to make informed predictions. By improving the data collection process with form processing tools, file conversion, and programmatic searches, insurers can provide their analytics platforms the best possible information for analysis.
5. Customer Experience
One of the few positive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic was that it forced organizations across every industry to find new ways of connecting with their customers. The insurance industry has traditionally lagged behind other sectors, tending to lean upon a combination of tradition and legacy infrastructure to engage with customers. But the events of 2020 have underscored the need for a true digital transformation that fundamentally reorients the way firms market, sell, and deliver insurance products. The need has become so evident, in fact, that a recent PWC survey found that 70 percent of insurance CEOs are prioritizing customer experience and user interfaces as their top investment opportunity.
In the coming year, firms will likely continue to invest in technology that makes it easier for customers to research and manage their policies. Whether it’s applications that allow them to submit claims information in a variety of file formats or forms and contracts that automatically fill in commonly used form fields, the core focus will be on making the customer experience as frictionless as possible with a variety of InsurTech benefits.
The Role of InsurTech
Many insurance companies will be looking to upgrade their technology stack and client-facing applications in response to these trends. That creates a tremendous opportunity for InsurTech developers who are creating the next generation of software tools to streamline core processes common to the insurance industry.
Delivering those digital products on a short timeline with limited resources, however, can be quite a challenge for even the most innovative InsurTech startup. That’s why many of them turn to third-party solutions to provide proven functionality that lies outside the scope of their development expertise.
Features like forms processing, document conversion, and image viewing can be easily integrated into an application using an SDK or API, saving the team weeks or even months of work. This helps InsurTech companies get their products to market faster to meet the digital transformation needs of their customers and keep them a step ahead of their competitors.
InsurTech SDKs and APIs
Accusoft’s family of processing and automation SDKs and APIs provide InsurTech developers with the tools they need to easily plug essential functionality into their applications so they can get back to focusing on their most innovative features. With a variety of deployment options and a diverse set of code-based solutions, we have the flexibility to meet your software’s unique use case and substantially reduce your time to market.
Whether you’re looking to integrate document viewing, collaboration, or processing to your InsurTech platform, our SDK and API-based products can help you deliver the InsurTech benefits your customers are looking for. Learn more about our insurance solutions or contact us today to demo one of our products.
On June 25, 2021, Accusoft announced the latest update to PrizmDoc Viewer, its industry-leading HTML5 document viewing and image processing integration. The version 13.17 update improves a number of existing features and adds key functionality, allowing developers to offer even more versatility within their applications.
“Staying still is never an option,” says Mark Fears, Director of Product Management at Accusoft. “We’re always exploring ways to improve our existing products to help software developers do more for their customers. This update incorporates a lot of feedback we’ve received from our partners.”
In addition to improving rendering fidelity and redaction functionality, version 13.17 also makes significant improvements to PrizmDoc Viewer’s Content Conversion Service (CCS):
- Convert Markup Changes in Microsoft Word: When converting DOCX files into another file format with CCS, you can now choose to convert accepted or rejected markup changes along with the document text.
- Convert Speaker Notes in Microsoft PowerPoint: When converting PPTX files into another format using CCS, you can elect to convert the slides only or include any speaker notes in the new document.
Incorporated into thousands of applications worldwide to deliver responsive file viewing and conversion, PrizmDoc Viewer supports multiple proprietary and open file formats. Its powerful REST APIs allow developers to integrate the annotation, redaction, and document comparison features today’s businesses are looking for into their software.
To learn more about Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer or download a trial for a first-hand look, please visit our website.
About Accusoft:
Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve their most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including OnTask, PrizmDoc™ Viewer, and ImageGear, are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version release, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com.
Continuous innovation has allowed Accusoft to build sustained success over the course of three decades. Much of that innovation comes from talented developers creating novel solutions to everyday problems, many of which go on to become patented technologies that provide the company with an edge over competitors.
Others, however, are the byproduct of looking at problems from a different perspective or using existing technologies in unique ways. Accusoft supports both approaches by hosting special “hackathon” events each year. These events encourage developers to spend time working on their own unique projects or try out ideas they think may have potential but have never been implemented.
For this year’s hackathon, I took a closer look at how our SmartZone SDK could be implemented as part of an automation solution within a .NET environment without creating an entire application from the ground up. What I discovered was that PowerShell modules offer a quick and easy way to deploy character recognition for limited, unique use cases.
.NET and PowerShell
One of the underestimated abilities of the .NET infrastructure is support loading and executing assemblies out of box from the command line using a shell module. Although there are many shell variants available, PowerShell comes preinstalled on most Windows machines and is the only tool required to make the scripts and keep them running. PowerShell also runs on Linux and macOS, which makes it a true cross-platform task automation solution for inventive developers who crave flexibility in their scripting tools.
Incorporating the best features of other popular shells, PowerShell consists of a command-line shell, a scripting language, and a configuration management framework. One of the unique features of PowerShell, however, is that unlike most shells which can only accept and return text, it can do the same with .NET objects. This means PowerShell modules can be used to build, test, and deploy solutions as well as manage any technology as part of an extensible automation platform.
Implementing SmartZone Character Recognition
Accusoft’s SmartZone technology allows developers to incorporate advanced zonal character recognition to capture both machine-printed and hand-printed data from document fields. It also supports full page optical character recognition (OCR) and allows developers to set confidence values to determine when manual review of recognition results are necessary.
Implementing those features into an application through a third-party integration is the best way to incorporate recognition capabilities, but there are some use cases where they might need to be used for general tasks outside of a conventional workflow. A number of Accusoft customers, for instance, had inquired about simple ways to use some of SmartZone’s features in their existing process automation software without having to spend weeks of development time integrating those capabilities on a larger scale.
Thanks to the versatility of PowerShell, there’s no reason to build such an application from scratch. SmartZone’s zonal recognition technology can easily be incorporated into any .NET environment with just a few snippets of code. PowerShell syntax itself is not very difficult to understand and for a quick start it should be enough to use a Windows Notepad application, but we recommend using your favorite integrated development environment (IDE) for a better experience.
Getting Started
First, you need to download SmartZoneV7.0DotNet-AnyCPU.zip from the Accusoft SmartZone download page and unpack it to any suitable directory. This bundle contains all required binaries to run SmartZone.
Create a Simple.ps1 file inside the unpacked directory and start typing your script:
using namespace System.Drawing
using namespace System.Reflection
using namespace Accusoft.SmartZoneOCRSdk
# Load assemblies.
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Drawing
$szPath = Resolve-Path ".\bin\netstandard2.0\Accusoft.SmartZoneOCR.Net.dll"
[Assembly]::LoadFrom($szPath)
# Create a SmartZone instance.
$szObj = [SmartZoneOCR]::new()
$szAssetsPath = Resolve-Path ".\bin\assets"
$szObj.OCRDataPath = $szAssetsPath.Path
# Licensing
# $szObj.Licensing.SetSolutionName("Contact Accusoft for getting the license.")
# $szObj.Licensing.SetSolutionKey(+1, 800, 875, 7009)
# $szObj.Licensing.SetOEMLicenseKey("https://www.accusoft.com/company/legal/licensing/");
# Load test image.
$bitmapPath = Resolve-Path ".\demos\images\OCR\MultiLine.bmp"
[Bitmap] $bitmap = [Image]::FromFile($bitmapPath.Path)
# Recognize the image and print the result.
$result = $szObj.Reader.AnalyzeField([Bitmap] $bitmap);
Write-Host $result.Text
# Free the resources.
$bitmap.Dispose();
$szObj.Dispose();
This simple code snippet allows you to use SmartZone together with PowerShell in task automation processes like recognizing screenshots, email attachments, and images downloaded by the web browser. It can also be deployed in other similar cases where the advantages of PowerShell modules and cmdlets can help to achieve results faster than writing an application from scratch.
Another Hackathon Success
Identifying a new way to deploy existing Accusoft solutions is one of the reasons why the hackathon event was first created. This script may not reinvent the wheel, but it will help developers save time and money in a lot of situations, which means fewer missed deadlines and faster time to market for software products. Developing unique approaches to existing problems can be difficult with deadlines and coding demands hanging over a developer’s head, so Accusoft’s hackathons are incredibly important for helping the company stay at the forefront of innovation.
To learn more about how that innovation can help your team implement powerful new features into your applications, talk to one of our solutions experts today!
The COVID-19 pandemic may not be the first pandemic to impact global supply chains, but its impact has been orders of magnitude greater than previous public health crises. Businesses around the world have been forced to contend with the twin challenges of transitioning to a remote workforce and overcoming severe supply chain disruption. As 2020 winds down to a close, it’s becoming clear that the pandemic may well represent a “new normal” for logistics strategy rather than a temporary situation.
3 Critical Supply Chain Challenges
From implementing new technology to establishing relationships with alternative vendors, organizations across multiple industries are taking steps to meet the challenges confronting their supply chains in both the immediate and long-term future. One of the biggest areas of focus is barcode integration. Although they may not seem like they belong at the forefront of innovation, barcodes are scanned more than six billion times every day and serve an incredibly important role in modern supply chain management.
Here are a few of the biggest challenges organizations are facing:
1. Supply Chain Visibility
Speed and flexibility are competitive advantages in today’s on-demand marketplace. Customers want products delivered faster and will quickly lose faith in brands that fail to meet their expectations. According to a 2019 survey of online consumers, 72.7% of respondents were unlikely to order from a company again after a poor delivery experience. Given those high stakes, it’s incredibly important for organizations to maintain high levels of visibility into their supply chains.
Barcode technology makes it possible to track products and materials throughout the entire production and distribution process. A quick scan is all that’s needed to update an item’s status every time it’s processed at a location. That information feeds into inventory tracking software that allows businesses to get a more accurate picture of how shipments move through their supply chain. This visibility makes it easier to identify potential problems and enhance overall logistics efficiency.
2. Digital Transformation
Despite the growing emphasis on digital transformation across the economy, the average supply chain is still held back with inefficient, legacy infrastructure. Small and medium-size businesses face the greatest challenges, with only 21% of them using digital tools to integrate their supply chain operations with other departments. In the retail industry alone, bad processes and data disconnects cost companies over $500 billion annually. As the holiday season draws nearer and promises to bring with it a massive increase in online shopping, having a fully digital supply chain in place with enough speed to handle that demand is essential.
Implementing the right digital technology tools can help organizations to streamline their supply chains and gather the data they need to make better decisions. Barcode integration software is a foundational component of this transformation because it forms a bridge between the physical and digital elements of logistics management. Shipments can be instantly scanned into tracking systems to provide a wealth of data points across the supply chain, making it easier to adapt to disruptions and develop better processes. Barcode libraries also need to be able to scan and decode both traditional 1D codes and newer 2D codes quickly and accurately to keep products moving swiftly and smoothly to consumers.
3. Automation
As many organizations have put social distancing protocols in place during the pandemic to protect the health of both employees and customers, automation has become more important to supply chain performance than ever before. These COVID-19 pressures are sure to accelerate what was already a growing push toward implementing automated software and systems. Gartner even projected in 2019 that 30% of warehouse workers will be replaced by collaborative robots by 2023, which will further drive the demand for automated scanning and inventory management tools to accompany them.
For these automated systems to work effectively, they will need robust software that can withstand the difficult working conditions of warehouses, assembly lines, and distribution centers. A barcode integration that struggles to accurately read damaged or broken barcode images, for instance, won’t last very long in such an environment. The software powering automated systems must be able to function under a variety of conditions and be adaptable enough to overcome obstacles without constant oversight from on-site workers.
Unleash Your Supply Chain With Barcode Xpress
Building software capable of meeting the needs of a truly digital supply chain is no easy task. That’s especially true when it comes to integrating barcode reading capabilities into supply chain applications. With so many barcode formats in use, developers need an SDK with the ability to accurately detect, read, and write both common and uncommon barcode types used across all industries.
Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress is a multi-language barcode integration capable of reading and writing more than 30 different barcode types quickly and accurately. A truly robust SDK solution, Barcode Xpress leverages the imaging functionalities of ImagXpress to repair damaged orbroken barcodes that other readers are unable to read.
Speed
Barcode Xpress is capable of detecting and decoding multiple barcodes on a page at speeds of up to 1,000 pages per minute. It doesn’t matter where the barcode is located, what type of code it is, or how many are present. The control is able to read them regardless of orientation within milliseconds.
Accuracy
Every time Barcode Xpress detects a barcode, it not only provides the information encoded within the image, but also reports a confidence value to ensure high levels of accuracy. Damaged, broken, or poorly printed barcodes can also be scanned thanks to the SDK’s image processing capabilities. Black noise, white noise, erasures, low resolution, white line streaks, and other common barcode problems are reconstructed and scanned automatically to keep the supply chain moving.
Versatility
With the ability to detect, read, and write over 30 different barcode types, Barcode Xpress is available in multiple configurations for Windows and Linux-based operating systems. The SDK library supports 24-bit color images, 8-bit grayscale images, and 1-bit black and white images, as well as providing more than 80 additional image processing and editing functions thanks to its ImagXpress integration.
Experience Barcode Xpress Today
Easy to deploy and utilize, Barcode Xpress is a true all-in-one solution for desktop and web applications seeking barcode recognition capabilities. Just a few lines of code is all it takes to unlock the full potential of your supply chain technology.
Find out just how simple barcode integration can be with Barcode Xpress. Sign up today to download a free trial or talk to one of our SDK specialists today to learn more.