You can read this sentence because your brain has been trained to interpret letters and their sequence as meaningful words. However, have you ever wondered how computers and machines are able to do the same?

It’s due to a capability called OCR. Let’s take a closer look at what this technology is and how it empowers you to improve your contracting processes.

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What Is OCR?

OCR stands for optical character recognition. This technology turns text from an image format into machine-readable text, making it easier to extract, process, and store text information in a digital format.

It is used by law firms, government agencies, corporations, legal services providers, and researchers and academics to process, manage, and access legal documents in a more efficient and effective way.

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Why Does OCR Matter?

Think about the process of scanning a physical document onto your computer. The document is uploaded as a JPEG or PDF and cannot be edited in a word processor. An OCR scans the characters on the page individually, recognizing different letters and punctuation marks, and uploads them as a text document. This process creates several benefits, including:

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Increasing Accessibility

By uploading documents, such as PDFs or scanned contracts, as text documents, OCR makes your documents accessible and actionable, allowing you to:

• Search for content
• Highlight and annotate necessary sections
• Tag information
• Leave comments
• Edit data

You can even use OCR to build machine learning algorithms that extract data from documents.

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Allowing for Digitization

Storing physical documents or non-searchable PDFs puts firms at risk for a number of complications, including compliance + security issues and lack of adaptability.

OCR allows you to digitize that information and pass it along to other systems for process management once the data is extracted.

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Minimizing Human Intervention

When machine learning and AI are integrated into the OCR process, organizations are able to reduce the need for human intervention since algorithms can recognize more varieties of document types and languages in a fraction of the time.

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How Does Evisort Use OCR?

Evisort uses best-in-class OCR that is based on deep learning and has been trained on millions of documents to achieve the highest word-level accuracy in the market. It works on over one hundred different languages and has support for handwriting as well.

Amine Anoun, Chief Technology Officer at Evisort, further explains how our proprietary enhancements optimize the accuracy of downstream data extraction.

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Want to learn more about how Evisort’s AI and OCR empower leaders to track, search, and analyze contract data on demand? Check out our analysis page.