Press Releases 2018

SoftBank and Cogent Labs Enter into Business Partnership
in the Field of RPA×AI

-Development of Cooperative Solution Employing RPA and AI-OCR

January 29, 2018
SoftBank Corp.
Cogent Labs Inc.

SoftBank Corp. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Ken Miyauchi, hereinafter “SoftBank”) and Cogent Labs Inc. (Head Office: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Representative Directors: Jun Iinuma, Eric Whiteway, hereinafter “Cogent Labs”) have announced a business partnership agreement in the field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) on January 29, 2018. The two companies will pursue joint development and provisioning of a solution combining RPA and OCR technology for handwritten documents, employing artificial intelligence (AI).

Softbank has collaborated with RPA Holdings, Inc. (RPA Holdings), the leader in the domestic RPA industry, to provide the RPA solution, SynchRoid. This technology can optimize a corporation's regular office work by automatically processing vast amounts of paper documents. However, many of these common documents, such as contract applications, questionnaires, medical interview sheets, medical certificates, or examination answer sheets, consist of handwritten text which must first be digitized prior to RPA processing. Cogent Labs' handwriting recognition service, Tegaki, leverages cutting-edge AI to automatically digitize this handwritten information with 99.22%* accuracy.

SoftBank and Cogent Labs will engage in joint development of a solution combining SynchRoid with Tegaki, which will enable businesses to automate tasks such as data entry, aggregation, and rapid mass-processing of documents.

The two companies aim to improve efficiency in numerous industries, including manufacturing, sales, finance, health care, service, and education, contributing to customers' work style reform.

Reference
“Future Stride” A web magazine delivering the future of business (Powered by SoftBank)
https://tm.softbank.jp/future_stride/topics/20180117/ (Japanese)

About Cogent Labs Inc.

Cogent Labs Inc., with its AI technologies, provides easy-to-use and intuitive solutions to solve real-world problems that improve people's quality of work and life. The company conducts advanced fundamental and applied AI research to create business solutions, leveraging expertise across many fields including time-series forecasting, information extraction, natural language and voice processing, and reinforcement learning.
Please visit Cogent Labs' website for more information: https://www.cogent.co.jp/en/

[Notes]
  • *
    Added on February 9, 2018: Please see the footnote on the following page regarding the details of accuracy of Tegaki.
  • SoftBank, as well as the SoftBank name and logo, are the registered trademarks and trademarks of SoftBank Group Corp. in Japan as well as other countries.
  • Any other company names as well as product or service names mentioned in this press release are the registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.