A2iA Encourages Adoption Of IWR For Forms

French recognition specialist A2iA continues to push the envelope in the market for automated data capture. The company recently announced a new pricing model for its FieldReader toolkit, designed specifically to encourage adoption of its innovative intelligent word recognition (IWR) technology. A2iA is targeting IWR at forms where traditional OCR and ICR technology fall down.

“IWR is the next step in recognition technology,” explained Courtney Rand, A2iA’s North American director of business development. “We’ve gone from OCR, which reads machine printed characters, to ICR, which can read hand-printed characters. However, for ICR technology to work, printing typically needs to be constrained to boxes, which is not the way people want to write.

“Comparing handprint recognition to voice recognition technology, ICR reminds me of the days when you H-A-D-T-O-S-P-E-A-K-V-E-R-Y-S-L-O-W-L-Y for voice recognition to work. We’ve moved past that phase to recognition of more natural speaking patterns. IWR is designed to recognize people’s natural handwriting patterns.”

IWR works by breaking down lines of writing into single words or elements. It does not go down to the character level, like OCR and ICR, and try to build words from there. Rather, it takes the elements it has determined and compares them against a list of potential matches. “The key to making an IWR system successful is limiting the vocabulary you are comparing the results against,” said Rand. “For example, if you are applying it to a field that contains automobile makes, such as you might find on a parking ticket, you only compare your results against a list of all known makes of automobiles.”

A2iA is not advertising IWR as more accurate than OCR and ICR technology in controlled environments. “We are not marketing it against established OCR and ICR applications,” stressed Rand. “However, there are some forms on which OCR and ICR do not work. These might include parking tickets, certain types of application forms, subscription forms, etc. We are marketing IWR as an option in situations where the only other alternative is manual data entry. And, we are saying that using IWR is less expensive than paying someone to key enter data.”

How much less expensive is hard to say, according to Rand, because of variables such as volume and required confidence levels. A fairly extensive white paper on the topic of IWR, authored by recognition software guru Art Gingrande of IMERGE Consulting, seems to suggest the use of IWR is approximately two-thirds the cost of human data entry. (A complete copy of the paper is available through the A2iA Web site at http://www.a2ia.com.)

To encourage people to try out IWR, A2iA is offering to charge customers a fixed rate for each field that FieldReader successfully processes. “In certain operations, in which the volume is large enough, even if we automatically process only 20% of a user’s fields, that might provide a significant enough savings to make the use of IWR worthwhile,” said Rand. “In other operations, we might process 80% successfully. The bottom line is that we don’t get paid unless our software is successful. There is no set up or maintenance fees. We are motivated to tweak and improve the application because, as we process more fields successfully, our fees go up. At the same time, the users’ overall costs should be going down.”

A2iA has written integration for FieldReader with capture products from leading vendors like ReadSoft, Captiva, Kofax, Cardiff, BancTec, Brainware, and VisionShape. “We expect service bureaus will be the first market to jump on this offer,” Rand said. “We are also looking for other partners, such as resellers and ISVs. The bottom line is that we think this type of technology can help the whole imaging industry.

“Most images for key entry are being sent overseas. And in those situations, image quality is not really a big concern. But, if we can get businesses to start thinking about using IWR as an alternative to key entry, they are also going to have to think about ways to improve image quality to increase accuracy. This means there will be more opportunities for sales of higher quality scanners and image processing technology.”

For more information: http://www.a2ia.com/Web_Bao/A2iA082FieldReader-Eng.aspx