Google Area 120 launches Stack, an app that scans personal documents and extracts key information – TechCrunch



[ad_1]

Google’s in-house incubator Area 120 is releasing its latest project today called Stack, an app that will help you scan your documents, receipts, and other papers you’ve dragged around the house and then automatically save them to Google Drive. . The app will also suggest a name for your scans and the correct category – or “stack,” as it’s called.

At launch, Stack can handle the scanning of a range of documents of different sizes – like invoices, purchase receipts or even IDs – which are then transformed into PDFs and organized, while the important information contained in the file are detailed using AI technology.

The idea for Stack came from Christopher Pedregal, who already co-founded the edtech startup Socratic, acquired by Google in 2018.

Pedregal notes that at Socratic, they had taken advantage of Google’s computer vision and language comprehension technologies to facilitate high school learning. At Google, he began to think about how these same technologies could be implemented for better document organization. To experiment with the idea, he teamed up with Matthew Cowan. The two first worked together on DocAI, a Google Cloud team that was developing artificial intelligence technology capable of analyzing billions of documents.

They realized that they could apply DocAI’s enterprise technology to users’ personal documents as well, which led to the creation of Stack.

With the Stack app, initially available for Android, users can take a photo of a document and the app will automatically name it and “stack” it in the correct category – like Invoices, Bank, Home, ID, Immigration, Insurance, Legal, Medical, Pet, Receipts, Taxes, Travel, Vehicles and Work.

Users can add multiple pages when scanning a document, and Stack will OCR all pages of a document, so that the full text of the document can be searched. Users can also start their most important scans for faster access.

While the ability to quickly scan documents by photographing them is not new – Microsoft has offered Office Lens for years, for example – Stack will also be able to identify key information from documents, such as the “date of”. due ”on an invoice, the“ total amount due ”or the“ account number ”. He can then extract this information to facilitate later research.

The application further allows users to search through the full text of documents, not just the title, to find the information they need. To protect the items, Stack documents can be secured with your fingerprint or face scan, much like Google Drive works today. And Drive users can automatically sync all of their scans to Google Drive.

Google says the app is currently available on Android, as a free download without in-app purchases. Based on user feedback, Google will decide whether or not to integrate Stacks with more platforms, like iOS.

[ad_2]

Source link