Why we fill our day by filling forms?

I do not know about you, but one of the worst way to spend time for me is filling forms.

Yet it almost looks like we humans have evolved to hurt ourselves, and this time by creating more and more forms to fill!

Why? Cry!

You get a form on the web, fill your shipping information, your credit card, etc. Luckily most computers OS does this for us to some extend. It is not confident enough sometimes, even though filling web forms is the easiest today for a computer. Yet it still ask us input by input, click away!

And yes I complain much less about that, because we do have some automation that somehow works (not all the times) and save us time.

Kudos to us! We did that!

On the other hand, you sometimes get actual documents to fill today, in the old times you had to do it with paper and pencil, and there we go: there was and there is no automation there in sight. None has seen a robot, let alone one capable of writing. Luckily again we have computers, so many of these forms we can fill today on a computer. Most of these are PDF forms, some fillable — great! Some are computer generated and you can jump form to form and input text by typing, but some forms are scanned and they do not allow you to fill them easily. You have to create boxes and input text, manually — that is super painful!

And yet we still communicate with this inferior form of data transmission to this day! Let alone we have millions of forms scanned or in paper form sitting in our data warehouses, and one day we will have to digitize them and even transcribe the… good luck. We do not have any of these tools today, even though computer vision experts have been at it for decades!

But back to filling forms!!! Imagine a dream system:

• you put all your private document into a folder
• you input a form to the dream system
• the dream system goes and fetches all data the form needs from your folder of documents
• it then pastes all in the form
• and presents the form to you, filled
• heart full of joy!

Why, oh why can’t we have that today?

Oh I guess I’ll have to work on it…

about the author

I have more than 20 years of experience in neural networks in both hardware and software (a rare combination). About me: Medium, webpage, Scholar, LinkedIn.

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