Neat?
Neat!?Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet.
Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries.
You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds.
A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on individual rows, interleaved with the headings. Even if I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess up the alternating row interleave. E.g.:
Overview
Hardware
SKU
A2
Zone
2
Software
Operating System
Windows
Image
Licensed
Yes
Chat GPT can "undo the damage" because it
understands not only what text is likely to be a heading, property, or value... but it has also seen
specifically the properties of the type of cloud VM I was working on! It understands these things to the same level as I do, and can fix up the formatting the same way I would.
Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time and effort would you have to invest to solve this style of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject, fix up the formatting.
Years of effort?
Decades?
Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet.
Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries.
You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds.
A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on individual rows, interleaved with the headings. Even if I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess up the alternating row interleave. E.g.:
Chat GPT can "undo the damage" because it understands not only what text is likely to be a heading, property, or value... but it has also seen specifically the properties of the type of cloud VM I was working on! It understands these things to the same level as I do, and can fix up the formatting the same way I would.Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time and effort would you have to invest to solve this style of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject, fix up the formatting.
Years of effort?
Decades?