ABBYY Vantage Reviews

Our primary use case of this solution is for document processing. Whenever I receive an email from a vendor or business it gets processed to the ABBYY server. I've created a layout in FlexiCapture that recognizes the template, extracts the field and puts it into the Excel format. I mainly work with purchase and invoice documents and ABBYY checks the validation conditions of an invoice. I'm the manager RPA developer and we are customers of ABBYY FlexiCapture.

The advantage of the solution is being able to identify and extract the element you need from a document. The template can be customized for this. We can create our own rules to validate some values before exporting the results. 

I would like to see consistency improved. If the same document is uploaded twice, I might get a different outcome the second time. Machine learning needs to be improved. We have some issues with scanned documents that may have a quality less than 300 dpi and the quality isn't high enough for ABBYY to accurately read it, and it therefore requires manual intervention. There is scope for improvement which could include AI modelling and training. If AI is there then it will identify it in a better way. There is a field training option that already has an ML algorithm for it, but it's not much use. Hand-written documents have less than 50% accuracy. 

I've been using this solution for a year and a half. 

We haven't had any issues with stability, I think it's better than other solutions. 

I don't know about scalability because I'm the only user in the company. We deployed in the AWS server and we have a team who control everything. We currently have eight projects related to OCR which are in the pipeline. I have already trained two other guys.

There is a forum for support but not many people are active. We have a license with them so we will usually receive a response within 48 hours. 

The initial setup was okay, the difficulties came later with the poor quality of documents we received. 

We pay an annual license fee, our management team that deals with that. 

I did a POC on all the different OCR tools in terms of the level of accuracy I get from each document. ABBYY and Amazon Textract did quite well, whereas Kofax did not provide as good a result. Textract reads the entire document data and provides raw data output in the string format. With ABBYY, I can add a field into the template and then extract it but in Textract adding a customized field is not possible.

Anyone using this needs to know they won't get 100% accuracy. Human intervention is required depending on the quality of the document. Clearly, if the quality is good, the results will be better. ABBYY has been on the market for over 20 years so they're well supported including all other RPA tools. Competitively, I think ABBYY is better than other OCR tools. 

It's good to test the solution with multiple samples. Once you create a layout, test it with multiple documents and see what you're able to achieve. If I see that 30 out of 100 documents are not processed 100%, I'll retrain it to improve the accuracy level for when the same document comes in next time.

I rate this solution a six out of 10. 

We are a logistics company, and, due to the fact that a lot of documents get generated on a daily basis, documents need to be processed and data extracted. That's our primary use case for this solution. We use it for a lot of data extraction.

The fact that IBM Datacap uses ABBYY's core engine for OCR, is quite useful for us. It makes them one of the key players as far as OCR extraction is concerned. 

The fact that they've packaged it very well in the sense that you have these field extraction batches which enable you to auto claim the documents, and you have these templates which are structurally laid out, which enables you to mark a specific zone from which data can be extracted. 

It saves us a lot of manual work.

The automation on offer is good.

Technical support, for the most part, is helpful.

A lot of things could be improved, especially if you look at the number of support tickets that we have created. Looking at those would indicate the things that can be improved. 

For example, more often than not, we are forced to rely on template creation in order to bring the accuracy of extraction to 100%. 

Even though the training works, it's not as good as it is made out to be. In our case, we've got thousands of suppliers and it is just not humanly possible for us to keep creating templates for each one of these suppliers. What we would need is an out-of-the-box extraction to be even more accurate, or for the training to improve in such a way that just the training should be able to give us a reasonable amount of accuracy. I know that 100% is too high a limit to aim at, however, even if we get close to 85% to 90% margin, it would be much better. Something that could do that out of the box would solve most of the problems.

ABBYY introduced a reporting data warehouse last December, however, that reporting data warehouse has its own fair share of problems. Something like accuracy and completeness of out-of-the-box recognition is something that should be available as part of your default reports in the tool itself. Right now, that is missing. 

ABBYY provides a document definition for an invoice, however, that invoice is a supplier invoice. In our organization, we deal with commercial invoices most of the time. The problem there is that supplier invoices. If you put them into the system, it gives you around 80% to 85% accuracy out of the box. However, with commercial invoices, you only get around 60% accuracy out of the box.

Based on the input that we have provided, ABBYY is now working on including the commercial invoices as well as part of that default invoice document definition. They are working on that as well. There are a lot of minor things that have come up. For example, when you create a template, ABBYY claims that you can export the default template that is generated as part of the training, and then make changes to that and then import it back. What we found was that the concept applies only to certain things. The training of the line items cannot be exported as a template. They said it's to do with the way machine learning was being applied and all that. However, these are all things which kind of increase the development time.

I have a couple of years' experience with this solution. I've been working with it since about 2019.

The performance can improve. Even though we have tried out the solution's provider, ABBYY, in terms of having more processing stations, all still boils down to the fact of how your application is configured. For example, in our case, we have about five processing stations in production. When we started off, it took almost 60 seconds to process one page because of the complex nature of our application. We had around five document types, and each type has to be classified based on a set of keywords, and then you had to apply the document definitions on top of them. Then it goes through this concept of the generic layout and the additional layout and so forth. Almost every page used to take about 60 seconds on average. Then we made a lot of tweaks to the application and then we brought it down to around 22 seconds per page.

That said, even then, when you're talking about the space that we are in, the domain that we are working in, sometimes a 100-page document has to be processed within around 30 minutes. If you take a 100-page document, only for processing that itself, it takes almost close to an hour. Then, what happens is that additional stages like verification, et cetera, by the time the data is exported and uploaded into the target system, it's taken too long.

With the normal ABBYY support, you go to support.abby.com and you raise tickets. The support is almost immediate. There are constant responses that come to you. However, what I've also seen is that there are a lot of complex problems for which we have not gotten the solution we need. While the response has been great, if you asked me whether all the queries for the problems that we raised have been solved, the answer is no. On the other hand, we also have a chance to interact with the ABBYY professional services team directly due to the contract that has been established with our organization. They are a wonderful bunch of people and there's this personal rapport that we have with them. We get in touch with them on a weekly basis and our query is resolved.

In our organization, it is the IT team that takes care of the installation. I do not have much information about the process and I wasn't really a part of it. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise users that, when you start off with your first project on FlexiCapture, choose a project which has at least something which can accommodate a very high pattern. For example, if you're going to go for a use case wherein documents have to be processed within the next 30 minutes, you're going to face a lot of problems. ABBYY is a wonderful tool, however, it has got its own set of constraints. It's very important to understand the constraints of the tool.

The strength of the ABBYY FlexiCapture license is the OCR engine. However, if you're extracting it to process millions of documents within a very small amount of time, that is not going to happen. 

It's very, very important for the final operators who are going to use the tool to understand what OCR is all about. The problems that we face are not technical at all. It is about trying to convince people, people who have been doing operations manually to change their processes. If you have a situation where people are looking at documents, looking at the data, and entering it into a system, and then come and tell them that the solution will extract that information automatically and they just have to verify that information, they'll need to change their approach. 

It's very important to get the business team who will be doing the verification into a meeting, in order to help them understand what OCR is, and also its limitations. 

You will need to specify the stock field and the zones. OCR is able to learn on its own and understand how to extract data from it. However, there are certain things that you will have to teach people. You have to tell them the fact that a page is converted into black and white, and that the gray areas either cannot be black or white as certain characters that are being recognized may turn out to be something else. OCR tells you the level of confidence based on what gets extracted. All this has to be translated to the business team so that they understand the tool and its limitations. If you do this, you can ensure the success of the project.

Therefore, while ABBYY, as a tool, is great, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before you start implementing it.

I'd rate the solution overall at a nine out of ten. We have had to initiate a lot of fixes, however, overall, it's quite good.

We need to understand ABBYY Vantage to add some projects and push them to our customers.

I have worked on many different OCR extraction tools, like document understanding, which uses ML technology. Compared to other tools, ABBYY Vantage is better because it's very user-friendly. It has a wide variety where we can manipulate or code the document as per our specifications, like OCR or many more specifications.

Since we are using a trial version, we don't have administration access to create a tenant to integrate my OCR series with Postman. Right now, we are doing one POC, and to complete that POC, we need that access because it's a requirement.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for a couple of months.

In my team, three to four people are using ABBYY Vantage.

Our experience with our FlexiCapture was good. In FlexiCapture, you have to create templates because it does not use ML or AI technology. We learned that ABBYY Vantage uses ML technology, and we want to explore it.

ABBYY Vantage's initial setup is very beautiful. We didn't face any hurdles during the setup.

The solution is deployed on ABBYY cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

I am using the solution mostly for voice processing.

We have approximately 30 use cases in our company.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY Vantage is flexibility. You are able to edit at a granular level providing good control over the process. Additionally, the brochures and guides were helpful in learning the solution.

ABBYY Vantage could improve the processing of handwritten notes.

I have used ABBYY Vantage within the last 12 months.

In our region, we have a lot of Arabic text that is handwritten which the solution could improve.

I rate the stability of ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

The scalability of the solution depends on the use case. However, if the solution is managed well it is scalable.

Our company is expanding and correctly we have approximately 16 users of the solution.

I have not used the support from the vendor.

There might be a need to complete a few courses to get used to the implementation of ABBYY Vantage.

We did the implementation of ABBYY Vantage in-house.

We were able to qualify for a reasonable price. The price is in the low to medium range compared to other solutions.

I rate the price of ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

I evaluated IBM and AI builder prior to choosing ABBYY Vantage.

If you do the training it will be easy to use.

I rate ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to develop structures for automatically reading customer documents. We produce the document definition for each layup and send data to customers. We have 40-50 developers using the solution in various departments. 

In the future, we will use the solution for automatic classifications of documents. 

The solution responds well to automatic document classifications with a 90% success rate. 

There are sometimes issues with calculations or integrations with the server when running multiple products with different languages. This causes data to not display properly in data fields. 

The system does not always train itself to recognize data properly from system leads. 

A more comprehensive training program should be available because free training books do not provide the level of detail needed. Sometimes, we encounter issues with an automatization but cannot resolve it even though we completed the associated training module. Training for particular scenarios need to be included in modules because integrations can be tricky or complex without these details. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is very scalable. 

We had one issue with speed where we could not achieve the minimum time for processing which should have been seconds. Otherwise, the solution is really fast with basic or fixed processing. 

Support does not answer tickets in a timely manner but eventually closes questions. 

For example, I have a few tickets for assistance with DVP, data pages, and working with multiple languages but support has not yet responded adequately to the email inquiries. I would like detailed information and an explanation for whether a shadow case can be used. I cannot authenticate, determine if available onloads would fix captures, or integrate without proper answers. 

Support should respond quickly to production issues. Time zones are an issue in getting responses because support works on Russian time. 

Support should have access to prior tickets to get a cumulative picture of issues a user has experienced. Generally, they do not have details from prior tickets to inform solutions so they base their answers on only the current ticket. Having cumulative knowledge will allow support to better understand a customer's situation and use case. 

I rate support a six out of ten. 

Neutral

The setup can be complex because it takes time to learn all the menu options. Our setup took one or two months because we wanted to ensure it was done properly. We do not use many of the menu options as our use case is rather basic. 

The help page is not very comprehensive or detailed. It uses code that is formal and the world is now more informal so some options might confuse users.

I have not evaluated other options. 

The solution is a good product but there is always room for improvement. I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to recognize pictures or PDF files and transfer them to Word or Excel.

It's easy to use.

The integration with UiPath is not good.

I would like to see more documentation and guides to help gain more in-depth knowledge of how to use ABBYY FlexiCapture.

I've been working with this solution for about three or four months.

I have had no issues with stability so far.

I chose ABBYY because it had more solutions for intelligence automation, and it looked like I could combine it with other automation solutions. We currently have 20 to 30 users.

I recommend ABBYY FlexiCapture, and on a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I would rate it at eight.

We are using ABBYY FlexiCapture for invoices.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY FlexiCapture is the accuracy of the general extractions.

ABBYY FlexiCapture could improve in the maintenance, and there are some issues. You have to make efforts to do corrections. Additionally, it could be more user-friendly in terms of connecting between different solutions.

I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for approximately one year.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is highly stable. The processing time is very fast.

We have two people using ABBYY FlexiCapture in my company.

I have tested Vantage, and it is more user-friendly than the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

The initial setup of ABBYY FlexiCapture was not easy, mainly because you have to configure a lot of things. It depends on the installation itself if it's going to be on the server or on the same system, but either way, it is not simple. 

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY FlexiCapture is the ability to create your own template on the fly. You can train and classify, you can work with those different templates without the need to do special programming for it or with minimum programming. Additionally, the solution is supporting the Arabic OCR, both of these combined features are the most important for us in the Egyptian market.

ABBYY FlexiCapture could improve the performance. We are looking for better performance because it can be a lengthy capture process and the accuracy needs to be enhanced when it comes to Arabic.

In the next upgrade, ABBYY FlexiCapture could add invoices for the Arabic or for the Middle East because it's based on European or American standards mainly.

I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for approximately four years.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is stable, we did not find any problems.

In our usage, ABBYY FlexiCapture has been scalable enough. We had a cluster-based operation.

I rate the support form ABBYY FlexiCapture a four out of five.

The support could be more responsive.

I have used OpenText previously and overall the solution might work better, but for our use case, ABBYY FlexiCapture has all the features we need that are important, such as Arabic OCR, and is priced well.

The initial setup of ABBYY FlexiCapture is easy.

The price of ABBYY FlexiCapture is better than some competitors, such as OpenText.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

The solution is used mostly for form extraction, fixed form extraction, text forms, data extraction, OCR, et cetera. We use it for digital document processing.

We run software that does basically business process automation. It's given us a form extraction utility to add. We're utilizing the ATR in the FlexiCapture engine, and in that way, we can use the FlexiCapture engine to process forms. Any forms that contain data, we can extract.

Without that, we would have to use pattern extraction, regular expressions, and things like that. This is a forms processing engine, which allows us to be able to set anchors and OCR values, et cetera. 

The form extractions engine and the FlexiCapture designer are really useful.

The solution is easy to set up.

We have found the solution to be stable so far. 

The product is extremely scalable. 

The UI is okay, however, I remember the scanning and the way that you actually get documents into the system. The FlexiCapture, what they call a process developer, could use some work.

The solution needs more web or cloud-based development. Cloud-based FlexiCapture development would be great.

The on-premise web version doesn't seem to be intuitive or easy to use or install. It's not user-friendly.

Technical support is slow to respond.

The pricing is a bit high and we are looking into other options. 

I've been using the solution for three years now. I've used it for a while. 

The stability is good. It's a reliable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales very, very well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

We have about ten users on the solution right now. They are mostly developers and consultants. 

Technical support could be better. once you create a ticket, it takes some time for them to respond, from a partner perspective. You send a ticket to an email address. There's no phone number. You can send it to support@abbyy.com and you have to wait. 

They do have a fairly thorough knowledge base. There are also available videos on YouTube. However, if you're having complex problems, it can take sometimes days for them to respond. If you're running a professional system, that's not going to cut it.

I don't know if they have level levels of support, and we have maybe just a really poor version of the support system. I can imagine that, if you pay for a really high level of support, then, of course, they're available. That said, from our perspective, being a partner developer, we've had problems with the support, for sure. If you pay for Professional Services hours, it would be my assumption that they would respond right away, however.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. It was not too complex or overly difficult. 

Licensing is paid on a yearly basis. I don't know the exact price of everything, however, I do know that it is expensive from the perspective of our management team. We've also been looking for other solutions.

We are a partner with ABBYY.

I'm using version 12. I believe it is the latest version. I haven't seen any updates as of recently. There could be a version 14 out, however, I'm not sure. We're using the desktop version. 

I would advise those considering the solution to watch the YouTube lessons and pay for Professional Services training and assistance. 

At this point, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is for processing documents and extracting data from them - using the OCR capabilities. Documents include invoices, purchase orders, things like that. I'm an IT solution manager and we are customers of ABBYY. 

We've had two main benefits from ABBYY. Screening documents is a time-consuming activity, which has no real added value by itself so the solution saves the company a lot of time. The second benefit relates to the energy involved in employees going through documents. It's tiring work and mistakes creep in. We now have an increased level of accuracy by using the solution. 

Clearly the OCR capability of ABBYY is the top feature in our context. We can rely on the ABBYY knowledge and experience to extract data and recognize texts in different situations and especially in different languages, particularly English and Chinese. 

The main thing they need to work on is simplification of the solution, particularly use of the search tool. Configuring is quite complex and it's not very user friendly, particularly the user interface if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and create some configurations for processing documents. I know they are working on it. We used the new ideas on page projects they recently released and that has been great for enabling non-IT proficient users to start configuring and using it.

The stability of the solution is good. 

It's quite easy to scale. We currently have around 10 users, mainly IT professionals but also other users. I'm responsible for managing and maintaining the solution with a support team, and we generally carry out an annual upgrade, rather than an upgrade whenever ABBYY releases a new version. We use it every day and hope to increase usage as it would help more and more people at the company. 

The technical support was good. 

The initial setup was quite simple, perhaps slightly more complicated because it's on premise so it includes taking care of the architecture. I managed the project and we built a platform in a few months. A consultant worked with me and another solution architect during the initial period. The total setup took between two to three months. 

We haven't measured ROI but definitely as mentioned, there are many time-saving benefits.

We are on-prem so we're just paying the license fee. They have a clear pricing model. You pay extra for the training content. 

The main difficulty, as I mentioned, is to get people started on it if they're not specifically trained on ABBYY or not an IT professional. It's initially quite difficult and more so now that the learning material is not freely accessible online. Other than that, it's just a matter of following the documentation and using it. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10.