AI Builder – Form Processing

AI Builder was recently added to the Power Platform. In this post I will look at the Form Processing module.

AI Builder modules

With the AI builder you can do 4 things:

• Form Processing
• Object Detection
• Prediction
• Text Classification

Form Processing

In this post I will have a look at the AI Builder Form Processing module.

Similar to my post about DocParser handling invoices. You can also use AI Builder to do handle invoices or other kind of documents containing data.

Once you have created on the Create button all you have to do is upload your invoices or any other document that you want to process.

Once you have uploaded document you will need to identify your data on the documents. This part of the process is called training. It is important that you include many of the different types of invoices that you might want to process later on.The better the training the better the end result will be.

Note that you will need at least 5 documents before you can go over to the next step. If you thought that you could just rename the same document 5 times then you are wrong. AI builder looks at the content of the files not just the name of the files!

Once you have uploaded the 5 or more documents the Analyze button will be enabled. The analyzing of the document can take a while and sometimes you might get errors like the one shown below:

Even if you do get the above failure, just try again and you should end up with the following step where you can select the fields on the document. this is actually a part that I was really impressed with. AI Builder is capable of recognizing a lot of the standard data in invoices without any failure.

The user interface for selecting the fields is very easy to use and very clear.

Selecting the fields

You can now select each of the fields and AI builder will suggest field names for you. You just have to click the ones that you are interested in.

Train the model

Now we are ready to train the model.

When you hit the train button quite quickly you will get the Training complete message

On the details page you can publish your model and now it can be used within Flow or PowerApps.

If you want to you can also do a quick test where you could upload some more documents to see if your data is found. This whole process is very easy to use and it works extremely well! I have build quite a few invoice handling systems in the past and my experiences of the AI build are definitely there with the best other products available

Use the Model

Once the model has been published you can use the model and even this bit has been made easy.

The above screen will get you to the normal App creation dialogues where you can add a name of an app.

Create the PowerApp

Now select the Form Processor in PowerApps.

Select the AI Demo model that I created earlier

Upload an invoice in my PowerApp to the Form Processor control

And Boom! I’ve got my invoice data and any other data available inside my app!