A Glossary of Terms

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation is a type of business process automation.  RPA is designed to automate the repetitive tasks business users find themselves performing on a daily basis because the software applications they use don’t integrate well with each other.  Similar to how macros can be recorded in applications such as Excel and Word, RPA can be thought of as a macro recorder and executer for the entire operating system and all applications installed on it.  RPA also includes many of the tools expected of a scripting language having the ability to read and write structured data from files and the ability to make calls to web services.  Unlike a scripting language, however, RPA robots are configured using a drag and drop Graphical User Interface (GUI) and aimed at technical business users, although in reality having some sort of software development experience is advantageous in configuring them.  RPA helps address the issue of IT departments having multiple demands on their time along with the business users requirements to streamline the manual tasks they perform which require little or no skill by allowing them to carry out the configuration themselves.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is not a new term, it has been utilised for decades in computer science.  It is the ability of a machine to mimic a human’s ability for learning based on experience and problem solving behaviour.  Humans exhibit intelligent behaviour in many different ways, from being able to recognise peoples faces, driving a car or finding key data and information within an unstructured document by reading the entire document and inferring meaning.  Horizontal AI can be thought of as a computer system that mimics many of the aspects of human intelligence using the same core AI computer system.  What has been seen more recently is the adoption of Vertical AI where one computing system is developed to learn and mimic one specific human intelligence;  it is unlikely you will see a driverless car that is also capable of processing your invoices for example!

Cognitive Computing (CC)

Cognitive Computing is the ability for a computer to reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally.  By mimicking thought and reasoning like a human it can be thought of as the ultimate Horizontal Artificial Intelligence.  The ability to perform many tasks we would consider only previously possible with human intelligence.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

OCR has been around for many decades and is the ability for a computer to take a typed document which has been scanned or photographed into an image and convert that image into text.  Taking our definition of a Vertical AI as the ability to mimic a specific human behaviour, recognising characters and words on a page, then OCR can be considered to be a very specific form of AI.  However, OCR itself infers no meaning or understanding of the text it has extracted from an image,  it simply converts the printed page into a text document which requires further processing to make use of it.

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)

Hand Writing Recognition

ICR is a superset of OCR and is the ability for a computer to take a hand written document which has been scanned or photographed into an image and convert that image into text.  It specifically refers to the recognition of hand written characters,  more recently however the term ICR has had a 2^nd definition introduced.

OCR combined with Machine Learning

With the increased use of Machine Learning algorithms being used on text that has been OCR’d from an image to not only recognise the printed text but also make some human like intelligent use of that text the term Intelligent Character Recognition has increasingly been used to describe such computer systems.

Average Handling Times (AHT)

Average Handling Time is an important metric when measuring the effectiveness of Digital Process Automation; it is the average amount of time a human takes to process one transaction or document. Often there is the need to keep a ‘human in the loop’ of a process, having them still perform higher functioning tasks which cannot yet be addressed using computerised methods such as rules based decision making, workflow, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) or even Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). By reviewing the end-to-end manual process and breaking it down into tasks, there will be many tasks that can be computerised and those that cannot. The time spent by an operator carrying our manual tasks will therefore reduce dramatically by leaving them only with those best suited to a human operator.