The process of scanning such a large variety of data provides a perfect opportunity for the use of Microsoft AI. By leveraging Azure AI knowledge mining solution powered by Azure Cognitive Search, we could apply a specific AI model that identified the variety of content types and formats in their archive, and by doing so, make it easy to extract insights that can speed and scale the journalistic process. Azure Cognitive Search ingests a variety of file formats and then applies custom AI models, OCR, entity extraction, and document classification. We can achieve incredible accuracy in identifying and labeling document segments, entities, and other key components like author, page number, issue, and more.

IDA - the Insights and Discovery Accelerator will:

• Intelligently identify entities: IDA recognises entities within text, intelligently linking related topics to help you understand key figures, organisations, concepts etc.
• Retrieve full transcripts from scanned physical books and text: IDA uses object visioning to identify characteristics like columns and hyphens from text scans to give you a full and accurate transcript.

• Create data sets from your information: IDA allows you to create data sets from which, visualisations of relationships and the charting of many facets is possible. A great visual tool for investigative journalism.

• Scan video & audio: Using the video indexer, IDA can recognise people, topics, entities and pull transcripts from both video and audio files.