Convergent AI Presents “Data Capture” Platform, Facilitates the Process of Transcribing Information from Photos

The digitization of services has become increasingly massive in the public and private sectors in Indonesia. The goal is clear, to make existing business processes more efficient and faster. However, in practice, some digital processes are not fully automated. For example, with a digital application, a company still has to validate the results of the form input online manually, to make sure the attached files match.

These problems made Lintang Sutawika, Roan Gylberth, and Timothy Devin initiate Convergent AI. Namely startups that focus on developing artificial intelligence technology for data capture needs (data capture) – refers to the process of collecting data from paper or digital documents using components optical character recognition (OCR). OCR functions to produce text transcription in digital format from photos, images, or results scan.

Here's an overview of how it works. For example, if there is an application for recording shopping expenses, developers can take advantage of the Convergent AI service to provide a shopping receipt scanner feature with a cellphone camera. Allows the application to record the product and nominal listed, the user does not need to write it down manually.

"In short, Convergent AI products and services are used to improve performance efficiency involving manual and repetitive processes, namely input data. Currently the Convergent AI system can process various documents ranging from identity documents such as eKTP or Family Cards, to trade documents such as e-KTP invoice," said Co-Founder Lintang Sutawika.

Latitude continues, as a product starter AI Convergent intended for financial companies that include banking, insurance, and financing; but it can also be adapted to other industries such as export/import and legal processing. As a SaaS, the product is commercialized through a subscription license.

“Currently, we are assisting a private bank in registering new customers. In this case, our system helps toinput customer identity data listed on documents such as eKTP and NPWP. With system capture data With this, the registration process and checking by the bank will be faster,” he continued.

Get seed funding from GDP Venture

Convergent AI has been officially established since the end of 2018 and has processed more than one million documents from dozens of customers. They have also booked seed funding (seed funding) from GDP Venture, a venture capital company that is quite actively investing in artificial intelligence startups. In addition to Convergent AI, GDP has also invested in Datasaur, Prosa.ai, 6Estates, Qlue, and Glair.

Related founder Lintang also said that the three of them met while running a master's program at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia.

"At first the three of us were running several projects computer vision and image processing. Things as simple for us as reading andinput data becomes a thing overwhelming when done repeatedly and on a large scale. We consider that the current development of artificial intelligence can beengineer to reduce manual labor."

Actually service data capture It has also been sold by many vendors, for example by cloud computing providers, they have variants of cognitive services, one of which is an OCR-based system. Convergent AI also sees these conditions, so they also try to present differentiation.

“The system we have developed is end-to-end. For example, some service vendors cloud computing has an OCR API service, but in daily practice, this OCR still has to be processed before outputcan be judged to be suitable for use. The system we have developed has been adapted for non-ideal conditions,” said Lintang.

Closing the interview, he conveyed his plans in 2020, "We plan to increase the number of documents that are ready to extract and add more types of languages ​​that can be read so that Convergent AI can serve more industries and customers, especially in Indonesia."