OCR: Extracting Printed Text from Scanned Documents - Part 1

OCR: Extracting Printed Text from Scanned Documents

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One of our clients in the banking sector recently came up with a request (or challenge, rather). 

While it is true that digitalization has brought a world of difference to banking, we are still nowhere near paperless banking. Regulations require banks to collect different types of documents from customers at the time of onboarding and for various other services. 

On an average, a single branch has to process at least hundreds of these documents on a daily basis. Automating this workflow would save the bank plenty of time and labor. The client wanted to build an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solution that could be seamlessly integrated into the existing banking software. 

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The Right Time for Businesses to Start Digital Marketing

The Right Time for Businesses to Plan Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is such a powerful means to connect with and influence potential customers that businesses can ignore it only at their own peril. But when is the right time to start planning your digital marketing activities? 

Right when you start planning your business! 

Really? What could go wrong if digital marketing is not considered at the outset?

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Building a food image detector

Building a Food Image Detector

The field of image processing has progressed so much in the recent past that most of our customer inquiries for camera-based mobile applications now include some kind of image processing. One of them was to build a food image detection module to detect multiple food items from a mobile camera image and mark their positions. The following post details the various stages of our research and how we eventually built a highly accurate food image detector.

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How to choose a cloud consulting company as your cloud migration partner.

5 Considerations When Selecting a Cloud Consulting Company

Businesses are placing more and more workloads in the cloud. However, a major challenge to cloud adoption is the complexity in implementing cloud projects.

For a firm migrating to the cloud, there are a lot of questions to be answered and decisions to be made. Standard concerns such as which workloads to migrate first, whether to use a private or public cloud or a mix, and what cloud migration strategy to adopt barely scratch the surface of the weightier problems.

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AI's Journey - Featured Image of Blog Post by Simon Chambers for QBurst

AI’s Journey

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is talked about everywhere, from its admirable role in cancer diagnosis to scaremongering about robots taking over jobs. Where did AI come from though, and how did it creep up on us all of a sudden?

With a slant towards the UK and Europe, this article attempts to give a holistic view of AI’s journey and enlighten on its breadth and scale. It also intends to dispel some myths, raise awareness about aspects that surround AI, and suggest areas for consideration in the future. 

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Top Text-to-Speech Software with Natural Voice

Top 4 Text-to-Speech Software with Natural Voices

Generating natural speech remains the holy grail of text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems. While intelligible TTS systems are well-developed, the quest for the perfect-sounding one is still on. Remember Duplex that debuted at Google I/O 2018? This AI-powered Google Assistant famously dialed up a salon, negotiated an appointment with the staff in an intelligent back-and-forth communication, without giving away the fact that it was a machine.

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AMP for Gmail: What's in it for you?

AMP for Gmail: What’s in It for You?

The dust is yet to settle on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project launched a few years ago, but here is something fresh to mull over: Google’s AMP for Gmail project. Anything from Google is reason enough to sit up and take notice, the tech giant being the chief purveyor of our Internet experience.

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Building a Real-Time Trading Application with Akka

Building a Real-Time Trading Application with Akka

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Writing real-time applications is hard; harder still, if it needs to be distributed and fault tolerant. Minimizing latency and optimizing throughput are major goals for such applications. They demand quick response times and positive user experience even in the event of a failure of an external system or a spike in traffic.

The legacy approach is to rely on external services, such as databases, queues, etc., to handle concurrent or asynchronous operations. However, this is not viable in many scenarios. Many real-time systems—such as trading or banking applications—cannot afford the long waiting times it takes to handle concurrent requests.

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IoT Analytics: The New Frontier in Business Intelligence

IoT Analytics: The New Frontier in Business Intelligence

The data engineering that precedes analytics was covered in our previous post, Data Engineering: The Heavy Lifting Behind IoT.

Among the many sobriquets that the Internet of Things has acquired, none is more expressive than the term “Internet of Insights.” Incontestably, industrial IoT’s claim to fame is the visibility it brings to previously inaccessible phenomena. The combination of IoT and cutting-edge analytics has pushed the frontiers of business intelligence, emboldening business organizations with better contextual awareness and predictive capabilities.

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