Robotic Process Automation (RPA) leader Blue Prism is Introducing intelligent document processing capability to its RPA suite with the Beta launch of Blue Prism Decipher.

Blue Prism Decipher is an intelligent document processing solution that can scan invoices, identify data points - regardless of their format and location, then extract those data points for use within RPA processes.

When analysing the interactions on its Digital Exchange (DX), Blue Prism found that the single biggest application, representing 60% of the items being downloaded from DX, was related to unstructured document processing.

Decipher is positioned as an easy on-ramp to document processing and is a document processing workflow that can be used to ingest & classify unstructured documents. It can be used “out-of-the-box” without the need to purchase additional licenses or products, and organizations can also incorporate their own document capture technologies, such as ABBYY, or document capture services companies within the Decipher framework.

Blue Prism Decipher is the first product to result directly from Blue Prism's dedicated AI Research Labs headquartered in London, which brings together PhD level research scientists and engineers across multiple AI fields, a world-class brain trust on the future of work, who will inform and spearhead developments on the company's embedded AI capabilities.

Decipher will clean documents to ensure that they are ready for processing, apply machine learning to classify the documents, and then to extract the data. Finally, it will apply a confidence score to the validity of the data extracted and pass to a business user where necessary, incorporating human-in-the-loop assisted learning.

Accordingly, Decipher is viewed by Blue Prism as a first step in the increasingly important move beyond rule-based RPA to introduce machine learning-based human-in-the-loop capability. Not surprisingly, Blue Prism recognizes that, as machine learning becomes more important, people will need to be brought into the loop much more than at present to validate “low-confidence” decisions and to provide assisted learning to the machine learning.

Decipher is starting with invoice processing and will then expand to support other document types such as inbound purchase orders, contracts and resumes as well as providing integration with best-of-breed, third-party document processing capabilities.

Blue Prism customers and prospects interested in becoming a Decipher beta tester can file an application. Following the trial, the Blue Prism Decipher software will be posted on the DX for free download by all Blue Prism customers.