Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by wenc on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:06PM (#21326059)

I was going to say. Many companies are already investing heavily in RPA (Robotic Process Automation) these days. It’s not widely known in tech circles but kind of common knowledge in traditional companies trying to automate tedious workflow tasks.

When I first saw it, I thought: this looks like a glorified Autohotkey or Automator. But companies like UiPath are doing very well selling this type of automation software.

It sounds mundane but for a company with lots of entry level staff, the paybacks are appreciable.

Coupled with cloud based OCR as a service offerings etc. a lot of data entry tasks can be automated.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by folkhack on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:49PM (#21327237)

> Autohotkey

Yep I've had to employ this software to get things done before. Also OCR doesn't need a cloud vs. a beefy computer - I do a lot of that too.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by wenc on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @03:45PM (#21327779)

Yes free OCR software itself is pretty simple and can run offline but if your accuracy requirements are high (for critical documents), different algorithms (typically proprietary) are needed and as well as fallbacks to contracted human labor for verification. At some level it makes sense to outsource to a cloud provider.

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by alexcnwy on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @05:45PM (#21328789)

> OCR doesn't need a cloud vs. a beefy computer - I do a lot of that too.

Can you elaborate on this?

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