Enhancing Retail Kiosks Efficiency With Edge-Based OCR

Client Profile

Our client is the biggest manufacturer of self-service retail kiosks, functioning in high-traffic areas such as shopping malls, convenience shops, and transit hubs. These kiosks provide a number of services, such as ticketing, bill payment, and client onboarding. The client's objectives aimed to increase operational efficiency and decrease friction in user interactions in response to growing customer expectations for quicker and easier self-service.

Challenges

For them to obtain client information from IDs, forms, and receipts, the kiosks relied primarily on human entry, which frequently ended in delays, inaccurate input, and unhappy customers. In addition to negatively affecting the user experience, these inefficiencies limited the number of transactions that each kiosk could process, which raised the need for backend assistance.

Solutions

We integrated Percepta, an AI-powered OCR engine with edge firmware capabilities, to its retail kiosks to expedite data processing and enhance kiosk performance. Without depending on cloud processing, Percepta allowed for real-time, very accurate text extraction from documents like printed forms, invoices, and government IDs by running directly on the kiosk hardware. The lightweight firmware improved kiosk speed and dependability by processing a variety of documents properly.

Results

After integration, the retail kiosks were able to automatically and accurately extract information in real time, allowing users to complete their tasks quickly and with minimal effort. The improved speed and reliability significantly enhanced the overall customer experience, reduced support inquiries, and allowed the client to operate more kiosks with the same backend infrastructure. The enhanced data quality also enabled better insights for customer engagement.