We at Mindee have a developer first mindset – we build APIs that developers can utilize to solve their problems. With our free API key, and a little bit of development work, you can quickly and easily begin using our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) APIs to extract information from your documents. But what about teams that have document extraction needs but are not developers? Or maybe your team does not have access to a dedicated developer resource. A no-code solution with Mindee might be the right solution for you.
We have integrated with Zapier to include our ‘off the shelf’ APIs: invoice, receipt and passport OCR extraction in their no code platform. We imagine this will mean faster and more efficient integration of our APIs into your toolchain – since you can now integrate our data extraction APIs with no coding!
What is Zapier?
Zapier is a no-code platform that helps you connect popular apps to automate workflows. Since Mindee’s goal is to automate your document processing – having our OCR tools available in Zapier is a no-brainer!
You can sign up for free at Zapier.com. Once you’ve signed up, you can begin creating your workflow (often called a “Zap”). The free tier is a great way to try out Zapier, but your “Zaps” only run every 15 minutes, and you are limited on how complex your Zaps can be. (of course, the more you pay, the more ‘cool features’ you unlock). When you first create your account, you gain full access for 7 days.
How do Zaps work?
All Zaps have *triggers* and *actions*. They basically do what they sound like: a trigger is something that happens externally to start the Zap. When that trigger happens, the action (or actions) will occur. Often, actions will trigger further actions to obtain the desired result.
In the case of Mindee OCR, all of our APIs are actions: when something happens – use one of the Mindee OCR APIs. Once the Mindee action has completed, you Zap will have all the extracted data from the Mindee API – and you can perform additional actions with the data.
For example, an incoming email with an attachment might be a trigger for your Zap. The Zap action will be to run the Mindee Invoice OCR Parsing on the attachment. The results of that action will be the extracted details of the invoice. Your next action might be to place these details in your Accounting software (for example: Quickbooks has a Zapier integration).
What’s next?
In upcoming posts, we’ll build some sample integrations with our Mindee Zaps, outlining the steps on how to quickly get your no-code OCR solutions up and running!
We’ll also feature a post on *how* we built these OCR Zaps, so that anyone hoping to build their own Zapier actions can follow along and build their own. If you are using Mindee’s document builder API to create your own OCR interface, this post will be of interest to you – by following these steps, you’ll be able to build your own Zapier integration with YOUR API.
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