Document and Image Intelligence
Three capabilities read content the platform cannot otherwise interpret: text and structure out of documents, the language a piece of text is in, and what an image contains.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Data:
- Documents — the documents this reads
- Data Extraction — a different feature, for structured files
Architect Panel → Automation:
- Tasks — Document Text Extraction, every 15 minutes
Not the same as data extraction
Worth settling first, because the names invite confusion. Data Extraction ingests structured files — CSV, JSON, XML — where a value sits at a known path. This reads unstructured content, where nothing is at a known position and the answer is a best interpretation.
If your source is a spreadsheet, use data extraction. If it is a scanned invoice, use this.
Extraction always runs in the background
Reading a document takes seconds to tens of seconds. Doing that while somebody waits for an upload to finish would make every upload feel broken, so work is queued and drained by a scheduled task.
The practical consequence: text is not available the instant a file is uploaded. Anything depending on it should react to the text arriving rather than assume it is there.
The Document Text Extraction task drains that queue every fifteen minutes and ships disabled — with it off, documents queue and nothing is ever read.
The three capabilities
- Document reading — text, and structure such as tables and form fields, out of PDFs and images.
- Language detection — which language a piece of text is in, with a confidence score.
- Image analysis — what an image contains, including text within it.
They produce likelihoods, not facts
Everything here returns a best interpretation with a confidence, and that shapes how it should be used. Treat a result as a strong suggestion: pre-fill a field, propose a tag, route something for review. Do not treat it as verified input to a decision nobody checks.
Accuracy is high on clean documents and falls off with photographs, handwriting and poor scans — which is exactly the material people upload.
Where it earns its place
Not in eliminating a human step, but in making one much faster. Somebody checking pre-filled fields against a document works several times quicker than somebody typing them, and is more accurate than either the machine or unaided typing.
Uploads are the material
Quality in is quality out. A scan at a sensible resolution, right way up, reads well; a photograph taken at an angle in poor light does not. Where you control the capture, guidance to whoever uploads is worth more than any configuration.
Worked example
A finance team uploads supplier invoices. Extraction runs in the background and pre-fills supplier, date, reference and total. A clerk checks each against the document and corrects perhaps one field in ten. Processing time per invoice falls by two thirds, and nothing is posted without somebody having looked.
Recommendations
- Enable the extraction task, or nothing is ever read.
- Do not assume text is available at upload — it arrives later.
- Use results to pre-fill, with a person confirming.
- Improve capture quality before tuning anything else.