Alex Yaseen
Last updated:
August 27, 2024

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Action on your messiest data with AI-powered PDF parsing

When it comes to technology in the workplace, we’ve come a long way. 

Colleagues can connect in an instant from across the globe, there’s a software product for just about every process imaginable, and collaboration tools make it easy to reach decisions quickly. Despite all the progress that’s been made to transform the way we work, outdated PDFs remain ubiquitous in business. 

Whether you’re auditing invoices, digitizing packing lists, or reconciling delivery receipts, chances are, you’ve come across your fair share of PDFs. There are 2.5 trillion PDFs circulating across platforms globally, and more often than not, humans are reading, organizing, and transcribing critical information from those documents. It pains us to think about all the errors made and the hours wasted.

We’ve been determined to put an end to the whole “copy and pasting data from PDFs” thing for a while—last year, we introduced PDF Parsing with AI so you would never have to manually review and input data from another PDF again. But now, we’ve completely upped the ante. 

Unlike most PDF parsers on the market, by combining multiple cutting-edge parsing approaches, Parabola’s PDF parser can now handle even your gnarliest, clunkiest PDFs with virtually no configuration. Even when there's a lot of variability from individual PDF to individual PDF. We don’t just recognize your document, we convert it into usable data in a spreadsheet-like table.

Most PDF parsers are brittle, struggling to process any unpredictable inconsistencies like page breaks, oddly formatted tables, and metadata mixed with tabular data. They may require upfront configuration that needs some level of technical expertise, a large set of example documents, and users to spend time training the software. And even with all that setup, your typical PDF parser can’t contextualize PDF data as well as a human can. 

We’re changing all of that.
 

Defining document keys: PDF parser is able to read handwritten text and generate “DOC ID” column without additional instructions.

Now marrying two elements of AI—OCR and a computer vision enabled LLM—Parabola’s PDF parser facilitates a smart, one-step import to quickly and accurately parse any PDF without hours of training. Combining battle-tested OCR technology with cutting edge multi-modal LLMs, means you never have to think about manually uploading or configuring PDF data again. And you don’t need to worry about where the information lives in your document because Parabola will detect it for you. See a demo of how it works here.

Once your PDF data is imported into a Parabola Flow, you can create powerful workflows to combine it with data that lives in other tools, then transform, visualize, and act on it—and it’s all automated.

Adding table columns: For column “BBC”, the name is hard to make out, telling "Additional instructions" that the value will always be a date helps it locate said value and generate the corresponding column.

Customers who have leveraged Parabola for PDF parsing are realizing incredible benefits for different use cases—from catching every freight discrepancy to recoup millions annually, to saving time digitizing Bill of Lading details every day. In addition to error-proofing data and saving time, customers have shared that they’re able to process more data without adding headcount, and their junior employees have become more engaged because they’re no longer manually inputting data.

Defining document keys: Example of the pdf parser returning a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ value for the “Temperature Monitor” based off of form checkboxes, even with handwritten text.

So the next time you catch yourself manually copy-and-pasting data from a PDF into a spreadsheet, remember there’s a better way. Stop sitting on your data and start acting on it with Parabola.

Want to learn more?  Click here to try it this feature out for yourself.

Submitted!
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Alex Yaseen
Last updated:
August 27, 2024