Is there any built-in connector for ABBYY OCR

[johnjohn123]

I am building a MS Flow for a SharePoint document library, and we need to OCR the uploaded images using ABBYY and populate the document library with the extracted data.. so my question is if PowerAutomate has any built-in capabilities to integrate with ABBYY?

Thanks

[iAm_ManCat]

Hi @johnjohn123,

There is no default connector for Power Automate for ABBYY, however ABBYY do have a cloud OCR SDK package you can purchase that will grant you access to their API, which you could then call via HTTP request from a flow, or create a custom connector that accesses that API.

Cheers,

Sancho

[johnjohn123]

@iAm_ManCat  but seems the customer does not have the cloud ocr license they only have a server license. so in this case it will not be possible to call the ABBYY API from Power Automate.. is my assumption correct?

Regards

[eric-cheng]

Hi @johnjohn123 ,

Few options below:

Option 1 - if your customer has Abbyy Flexicapture which has a windows/web based application, you could try using a UI flow to automate the upload process.  I would not recommend this though as a long term solution.

Option 2 - Abbyy has a SDK and you could see if your IT department could write some APIs using Azure Functions or similar and call it from your flow

Option 3- Whilst your customer has invested in Abbyy, I would recommend looking at Azure Cognitive Services / AI builder.  Their OCR capabilities as well as the ability to now create custom models for forms processing is really good.  We use this currently for thousands of invoices.

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[johnjohn123]

@eric-chengthanks for your reply and detailed info.

For option-2, I am still not sure how we can call the ABBYY API from PowerAutomat flow, if the ABBY  API is not exposed to the cloud.. As I mentioned the client has only the server license for ABBYY and not the cloud license.

For option-3, Now we tried to use the Form Processing AI provided by PowerAutomate, but we faced an issue is that currently the form processing does not have the ability to process check-boxes, so per your knowledge will using Azure Cognitive Services / AI builder allow us to process check-boxes?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards

[eric-cheng]

Hi @johnjohn123 ,

Looking at Forms Recognizer, it appears v2.1 supports checkboxes.  

You can try this out by quickly building a model.  

I wrote a blog article last year which contains a step by step guide if you want to check it out here.

There is a connector for Forms Recognizer or you can simply just call the API like in my article if you don't want to use preview features.

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