In an interesting combination, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, NICE, will now make use of ABBYY’s NLP tech for processing unstructured data contained in scanned documents that it handles for corporates – which could include legal documents and of course, contracts in general.
This is described as an expansion of its existing partnership with ABBYY, which will, say the companies, permit: ‘expanded cognitive capabilities for NICE’s unattended ‘robots’.’
Note: when they say robots they mean RPA programs that automate certain repetitive admin tasks in a desktop environment.
The companies noted that this ‘means data from scanned documentation can now easily be extracted, categorised and transformed into structured data using ABBYY FlexiCapture’s learning algorithms’.
In short, they’re sticking together the extraction bit with a platform that’s good at doing repetitive tasks in a workflow.
Why would anyone want to use this? It would make sense to use this kind of combo when you had a very high volume of templated matters coming into an in-house team, for example, where a corporate wanted to rip out the key data and then let the RPA program drive it to certain places in the system.
But, is this a big deal? Well….probably more of a medium size event, as they were already working together. That said, it’s interesting to see a major listed RPA company build up its NLP doc review capability.
It’s fair to say that if NICE really went to town on marketing this to law firms and legal teams they probably could make significant progress, though they have never been a one sector player. ABBYY is also not that well known in legal circles, but the company today has offices in 11 countries and over 1,100 employees. One reason for lawyers perhaps not knowing it so well is they have generally had a multi-sector approach as well.
Barry Cooper, President, NICE Enterprise Group, said: ‘Via this integration, our customers are empowered to improve business performance and ROI while delivering uncompromising customer experiences.’
Neil Murphy, Vice President, Head of Global Business Development, ABBYY, added: ‘We’re excited to expand our partnership with NICE, who we believe have a novel approach to RPA and to integrating our leading-edge FlexiCapture Distributed solution into its platform.’