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Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Unless you’re dealing with ancient data wouldn’t it be easier to have whatever that’s generating the PDF return

Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Unless you’re dealing with ancient data wouldn’t it be easier to have whatever that’s generating the PDF return machine readable data ? This suggests to me that lot of office jobs will be lost just by modernizing systems and making them spit out JSON

NikolaeVarius 6y ago
PDFs do not solely consist of computer generated files. PDFs also come in the form of paper that have been hand written on or scans.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Those should be replaced by web apps or mobile apps. Its 2020.
gridlockd 6y ago
You generally do not control the process that generates the PDF or other unstructured data. Consider invoicing, you may have hundreds of distinct sources, but none of them individually would warrant automation. It is a problem of standardization. Any standard complex enough to cover all business cases would be too expensive to implement, or you could not get all stakeholders to adopt it, and so on. Accountants would not want to make themselves redundant, obviously.
- bsaul 6y ago
  there's probably a better tradeoff than a format that only gives you "print this character at x,y coordinate". Websites have been able to produce "ready to print" html for a while now, and html (even with a lot of restriction) would be hundred times better than PDFs.
bsaul 6y ago
don't know why you got downvoted. The widespread use of PDF is a disease that needs to be eradicated... the only problem is we don't know (yet) with what we should replace it, but it's definitely amazing we have to hope for ML to be able to understand a format we, humans, decided to have machine produce.
Havoc 6y ago
> Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Much of the world is full of PDFs that are bad scans. Upside down, sideways, green, or maybe in French because why not. >making them spit out JSON This doesn’t just require fixing your business but every other biz you interact with. Modernize your own stuff isn’t enough. A bit like offices still list fax numbers

NikolaeVarius 6y ago

PDFs do not solely consist of computer generated files. PDFs also come in the form of paper that have been hand written on or scans.

thewarrior 6y ago
Those should be replaced by web apps or mobile apps. Its 2020.

gridlockd 6y ago

You generally do not control the process that generates the PDF or other unstructured data. Consider invoicing, you may have hundreds of distinct sources, but none of them individually would warrant automation. It is a problem of standardization. Any standard complex enough to cover all business cases would be too expensive to implement, or you could not get all stakeholders to adopt it, and so on. Accountants would not want to make themselves redundant, obviously.

bsaul 6y ago
there's probably a better tradeoff than a format that only gives you "print this character at x,y coordinate". Websites have been able to produce "ready to print" html for a while now, and html (even with a lot of restriction) would be hundred times better than PDFs.

bsaul 6y ago

don't know why you got downvoted. The widespread use of PDF is a disease that needs to be eradicated... the only problem is we don't know (yet) with what we should replace it, but it's definitely amazing we have to hope for ML to be able to understand a format we, humans, decided to have machine produce.

Havoc 6y ago

> Why exactly do you need an AI that reads a PDF ? Much of the world is full of PDFs that are bad scans. Upside down, sideways, green, or maybe in French because why not. >making them spit out JSON This doesn’t just require fixing your business but every other biz you interact with. Modernize your own stuff isn’t enough. A bit like offices still list fax numbers