Technical FAQs

Far from just another tech industry buzzword, artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming a mainstay of data collection and analysis for many organizations. According to research by Accenture, not only do 84 percent of executives think leveraging AI is critical to meeting growth objectives, but three out of four of them believe they will risk going out of business if they don’t scale those initiatives.

That fear of being left behind is why 88 percent of companies have already invested in AI or machine learning technology or plan to do so in the near future. With some 175 zettabytes of data expected to be created in 2025, organizations without the AI data processing tools necessary to analyze and make sense of that data will struggle to develop effective business strategies and deliver a competitive customer experience.

It’s a tremendous opportunity for independent software vendors building the next-generation of applications across various industries. In order to deliver on the promise of AI, however, these software solutions also need to provide the tools that allow users to leverage their capabilities to streamline business processes. After all, a powerful AI solution isn’t of much use if it can’t be integrated with existing workflows.

Getting the Most Out of AI Data Processing

The most successful developers understand that AI data processing is only one piece of the puzzle. Their innovative AI technology is driving the car, but they still need the frame and wheels around it if the application is going to take their customers anywhere. That means building the less glamorous, but equally essential technology that helps AI data processing solve everyday tasks.

Take, for instance, document or image management. Organizations that gather data from physical forms or scanned documents need some way of extracting information so it can be converted into a format AI data processing tools can utilize. Manual data entry is both time-consuming and prone to error, so requiring users to transfer information by hand is simply not viable. By building document and image processing capabilities into their applications, developers can greatly enhance the versatility of AI data processing by automating key aspects of the collection process.

There’s also the question of what can be done with all of that data once it’s been gathered. Legal organizations, for example, often need to apply that information to contract creation, while insurance agents turn to it when assessing risk. By combining AI data processing capabilities with document assembly tools and search functionality, organizations can further automate key business processes to improve efficiency. Why painstakingly draft legal contracts or master service agreements from scratch when applications can use automation tools in conjunction with AI to assemble documents with greater speed and accuracy?

Build vs. Buy?

This often presents a challenge for software developers with limited resources. On the one hand, they need to invest as much time and energy as possible into their innovative AI data processing capabilities in order to meet the collection and analysis needs of their customers. But without also providing some way of interacting with and using that data to improve other key tasks, they will struggle to persuade potential users to adopt their innovative platform.

One solution is to build that functionality in-house. For software developers with substantial resources, this might sound like a good option. Unfortunately, the reality often proves less than ideal. Even something as basic as viewing and converting documents can quickly become a massive undertaking that draws valuable developer resources away from the AI data processing capabilities that are supposed to help the product stand out in a crowded market. 

In many cases, the company ends up having to outsource the work or push back key deadlines. Even worse, it may also end up creating more problems than it solves by relying on open source toolkits and libraries. The biggest problem has to do with security vulnerabilities. A recent study found over 2,600 bugs reported in open source projects between 2015 and early 2020. Even worse, many of these vulnerabilities were not formally reported to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) until well after they were first exposed, giving hackers and other hostile actors time to exploit the security gaps.

The Integration Solution

Developers can avoid delays and security risks by turning to proven SDK and API integrations for their application needs. This is especially effective for complex, but essential functionality like viewing, conversion, compression, editing, and assembly. By relying on code-based integrations that are actively supported, they can ensure that users will be able to leverage their AI data processing solutions securely and effectively.

Rather than building features from the ground up and wasting valuable development resources, independent software vendors can devote more time and energy on the core competencies that will make their application more competitive. That allows them to build more powerful AI data processing capabilities and bring those features to market even faster.

Enhance Your AI Data Processing Application with Accusoft Integrations

Accusoft’s family of SDK and API integrations helps software developers realize the potential of their applications by delivering proven document and image processing functionality. Whether you need document assembly tools to get the most out of your legal AI sifters or powerful HTML5 viewing capabilities to harness the power of risk management automation, our easy-to-implement, code-based integrations can help you realize the full potential of your application’s AI data processing.

Find out more about how the Accusoft development team is incorporating machine learning into their processes or talk to one of our integration specialists today to learn how we can enhance your AI data processing application.

Curious as to how to use PrizmDoc with Node.JS and HTML? You’ve found the right video! Watch as a Technical Support Rep takes you through the PrizmDoc Node.JS and HTML GitHub sample.

For additional information, please visit PrizmDoc!  To learn more about Accusoft, please visit www.Accusoft.com.

Curious about how to use PrizmDoc with Node.JS and React? You’ve found the right video! Watch as a Technical Support Rep takes you through the PrizmDoc Node.JS and React GitHub sample.

For additional information, please visit PrizmDoc!  To learn more about Accusoft, please visit www.Accusoft.com.

Cells can view and edit XLSX files. Other Microsoft Excel formats require conversion to XLSX.

PDFs are everywhere. Vice calls them “the world’s most important file format,” and that’s not far off the mark. The sheer number of documents converted to, from, and often back to PDFs is astounding. The hard truth? They’re also frustrating to work with. Start a Google search with the word “convert” and three of the top five results involve PDFs. 

While this portable document format lives up to its namesake by making it easy for users to attach and send documents across their organizations, PDFs often run into problems when it comes to conversion, collaboration, and communication. While many tools offer piecemeal PDF functionality, they lack a complete cadre of critical capabilities, in turn forcing software engineers to use multiple software solutions for seemingly simple tasks. 

ImageGear offers a different take on the standard software development kit (SDK) designed to help developers maximize their PDF potential. Here’s how it works. 

The Value of PDF Conversion

While PDF conversion is one of the top sought-after functionalities, there’s another area that’s often overlooked: modifying the characteristics of PDFs on-screen. With companies now handling PDFs from multiple sources that may include everything from computer-generated form data to handwritten information and images, it’s no surprise that staff encounter a wide variety of viewing issues.

ImageGear PDF helps solve these problems by allowing users to call the shots on PDF content at scale with features such as:

• Conversion
• Metadata Management
• Content and Font Editing
• Text Extraction
• PDF Watermarking
• Container, Dictionary, and Layer Creation
• 3D Asset Modification

ImageGear PDF also helps improve document processing with document cleanup and advanced optical character recognition (OCR). With the ability to encrypt and decrypt entire images (or part of an image), automatic ImageClean correction of white text blocks, borders, and inverted images, plus intelligent re-sizing, any PDF can be cleaned and made more readable for the user. 

OCR support for almost any document type is also a benefit. This includes those produced on typewriters, dot-matrix printers, ink-jet printers, laser printers, and photocopied, scanned, and faxed documents. ImageGear PDF helps users control and customize multiple PDF variables, making it a fully functional PDF conversion solution for your application.

PDF Pain Points

One of the biggest PDF frustrations? The inability to break apart and combine PDF documents. Let’s imagine you have a massive legal PDF or in-depth medical file. In these circumstances, professionals only need a portion of the PDF, but without the right tools they’re stuck sending entire files when all they need is a single page. In other cases, employees might have a host of related PDFs that are part of the same project, but can’t be easily combined to save space and time.

ImageGear PDF has you covered with the ability to easily delete or insert PDF pages, render pages in a single PDF, split a PDF, merge two or more PDFs into a single file, or even merge specific pages from two or more PDFs into a single PDF. This not only makes a massive difference in time spent working with PDF documents, it helps reduce unnecessary storage and transmission of multiple files. 

Convert PDF: Multiple File Formats for Conversion

Conversion is critical for PDF success. Instead of creating complexity by forcing end-users to stick with original file formats, implementing an SDK with cutting-edge conversion empowers corporate consistency and saves on storage space. ImageGear PDF supports a host of common file formats for conversion including Microsoft Office, JPEG 2000, CAD, and SVG.

Of course, no feature forward PDF framework is complete without robust annotation, redaction, and commenting capabilities. These features make it easy for other users to see exactly what’s been changed, when, and why, along with providing a critical, auditable paper trail to meet evolving compliance and regulatory standards.

PDF Functionality for Your Application

Best of all, ImageGear isn’t designed to replace your current software, but integrate alongside existing workflows. Rather than adding another application to already-overloaded IT arsenals, straightforward SDK integration means everything happens within your own application, making it easy for everyone to find exactly what they’re looking for within familiar territory. Need help jumpstarting your SDK deployment? Check out our full list of ImageGear .NET samples for ASP.NET, CAD, OCR support, and more.

PDFs remain eternally popular and continually frustrating. Solve for document viewing, split and merge, and conversion issues and streamline employee efforts with ImageGear.

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!

ISVs, corporations, and SaaS solutions all have the same immediate digital transformation needs in common; they all need to bring forth technologies that improve both the customer and employee experience. The challenge is building and launching these technologies quickly, efficiently, and within a scalable, sustainable model. Product managers and development teams are all evaluating options to assist with meeting stakeholder demands for quality, while also meeting the need for speed to market. Enter the hidden value of third-party software integrations.

The secret life of APIs

Digital transformation is an ever-increasing priority for all businesses as well as an initiative that is seeing a surge in funding. In a recent State of the API Economy 2021 report by Google, 56% of enterprise leaders say APIs help them to build better digital experiences and products. Leaders are also finding value in focusing on an API-driven strategy, and 52% say APIs accelerate innovation by enabling partners to leverage digital assets at scale. 

How API Integration Works

At a very simple level, an API consists of code that allows two separate technology systems to communicate and interact with one another. It functions as a translator and messenger; delivering user requests and data from one system to a completely separate system. This effectively allows an application to utilize the features and data of other applications without having to build out that functionality from scratch.

For example, the Uber ride-sharing app connects customers to available drivers within a specific area. It does this with a combination of smartphone geolocation and accurate maps, but the Uber app doesn’t have mapping capabilities. To get those features, it connects to Google Maps by way of an API that allows the Uber app to access the relevant navigational data and use it to connect customers to drivers.

Another key function of APIs is their ability to automate key processes and connect legacy infrastructure to newer technology systems. Data can be collected in one system, for instance, and “pushed” into another system automatically. This not only eliminates the complicated (and error-prone) task of manually transferring data between different systems, but also allows users to build a workflow in an application they’re already accustomed to, without having to learn an entirely new system. 

More importantly, since APIs allow newer technologies, devices, and legacy applications to talk to each other, they provide firms with substantial flexibility when it comes to adding new platforms. Purchasing new software doesn’t mean throwing out existing tools, which significantly reduces the risks associated with technology investments and upgrades.

The cost savings with API Integrations

When you purchase a third-party API integration you’re gaining more than additional functionality for your application. You also gain access to a team of developers and support specialists who are here to assist you from POC to deployment and beyond.  Leaning on the specialization of a third-party vendor allows your developers to focus on application enhancements and release your product to market faster. Ultimately saving your company valuable development time and realizing product revenue faster.

Interested in learning more?

Could your business benefit from an API led digital transformation strategy? Schedule a consultation today, to learn more about the document management API integration options available from Accusoft.