AI Builder July 2021 update

We are excited to announce the general availability of several AI Builder capabilities, new additions which will improve our document automation capabilities, as well as some language and geographic coverage extensions.

Scenarios becoming generally available

Several AI Builder models have graduated out of preview and reached general availability.

In past months, we enhanced AI Builder with new capabilities which are now production-ready:

• Invoice processing – Read and save information from invoices which now also include the ability to extract line items.
  
• Receipt processing – Read and save information from receipts, with support now for sales receipts from Australia, Canada, United States, Great Britain, and India.
• Identity document reader – Read and save information from identity documents.

You can try out these AI models today directly from the AI Builder page.

Generally available products and services are considered production ready.
By moving out of preview, these models become premium. You will need an AI Builder license or an active trial to continue using them.

In addition, new features on existing generally available scenarios will now also be production ready.

• Train using documents that have different layouts – This feature was released in public preview last November and allows users to create a unique form processing model that will extract the same information from up to 100 different document layouts.
• Ability to specify the page to be analyzed (available mid July) – Form processing, invoice processing and receipt processing models can now specify a page or page range to be analyzed in the Power Automate action. This is useful to process only the relevant parts of the documents reducing prediction costs.

For additional resources on AI Builder, visit Power Apps and learn how your users can make their apps AI enabled, or go to Power Automate and learn how your users can make their workflow solutions better with AI. Please visit our pricing pages to learn more about the AI Builder capacity add-on for your apps and workflows. Visit our Licensing page for more information on licenses and trials.

Support of additional languages

We have added the support of new languages for sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction. See Language support – Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis and for Text Recognition, see Language Support – Text recognition

For text recognition, this also includes some OCR performance improvements. AI Builder leverages Cognitive Services Computer Vision. You can access the list of all languages supported with version 3.2 here – Language support – Computer Vision.

Coming soon: Form processing will support documents from these 73 different languages later this summer including Japanese and Chinese.

Making it easier to use your form processing model in cloud flows

One popular scenario that customers are using form processing for is to automate data extraction from documents received by email. Now, after training and publishing a form processing model and selecting Use model a New flow in Power Automate, you will land in an end-to-end functional cloud flow that will process documents from email attachments. You can test the flow right away to see it in action and then tailor it to meet your business needs.

Confidence scores and automatic validation in document automation

The prebuilt end-to-end solution for automating the processing of documents has been updated with new capabilities to enrich and simplify the pipeline.

When the data has been extracted from documents, some basic validation rules are now executed to check empty or not recognized fields and detect low confidence.

In this case, the documents must be reviewed by a human, the confidence of each field being now visible in the validation application. Otherwise, the data extracted can be automatically exported to the target system.

Availability in US GCC, GCC High, and Switzerland

We have added the support of environments created in the US government cloud GCC and GCC High.

Support for Switzerland will also be available by mid-July. Customers in these regions can now leverage AI Builder on their current environment without the need to take any action.

They can be assured that their data will be processed in these boundaries.

The list of available scenarios on these new regions can be reviewed in the feature availability by region matrix.

Other enhancements

• We have improved the export and import reliability of solutions containing models retrained multiple times.
• Makers on the tenant’s default environment can now enable AI Builder and Dataverse from the AI Builder home page if missing.

We are always working to improve AI Builder to meet your needs. As always, feel free to share your feedback with us in the AI Builder forum or email us directly at aihelpen@microsoft.com.