Medieval Alchemists
The scene is a medieval palace. The Empress is holding court. A two-person team strides confidently up to the base of the flight of stairs leading up to the platform upon which rests the Empress’s throne. Perhaps a little too confident; perhaps a little too close.
It is clear that in the social pecking order, the one man wearing the brightly colored robes appears to be the star. He is the Alchemist. He presents his teammate, a slight woman in simple clothes who is outwardly quiet but possessing of a demeanor that commands silent respect. She is the Enabler.
Together, the Alchemist and the Enabler proceed to perform a series of incredible magic tricks for the Empress. Mixing two powders with each other to create a spectacular explosion (1). Mixing two plain-looking liquids to generate an incredible fountain of foam in seconds (2). And presenting a mysterious concoction that changes colors — from one to another, and then to another — as if it is “breathing” (3). The Alchemist does the presenting of these tricks, while the Enabler skillfully prepares the exact mixtures and compositions to generate these incredible effects at the exact time.
The Empress is awestruck. She immediately asks them to join her court. They agree. The Alchemist has the look of pride in his eyes — which immediately turns to gratitude as he looks at the Enabler, who looks back knowingly. For without her, he is nothing.
Modern Enablers
In today’s world of generative AI, the foundation models are the equivalent of the Alchemist. They are the ones responsible for the ever-more-impressive demonstrations that we see across social media platforms. But in order for those demonstrations to work, you need to have an Enabler. And taking it a step further, in order to make the leap from demonstration to actual business value, the Enabler needs to be as versatile and capable as possible.
Over the past several months, we have shared with you a repertoire of products that are the equivalent of the Alchemist: deposition, arbitration, and trial summaries. But in order for them to do their work, they have their own Enablers: all the back-end algorithms that prep the inputs and silently orchestrate the works-in-progress to provide their almost-magical outputs.
PDF Analyzer
Today, we’re pleased to introduce a new Enabler: PDF Analyzer.
“A PDF-to-TXT converter? What’s the big deal? There’s hundreds of them on the market,” some might say.
Yes, there are. But they’re generic text extractors that parse binary code and output characters that exist in the file. They don’t “know” what’s in the file, “understand” whether it makes sense, and “regenerate” it into based on that understanding. That’s why there’s so much gibberish in many outputs, to the extent that it necessitates a huge manual correction effort. Or, worse yet, a full retyping of the document BY HAND. Not a fun task for thousands of pages of deposition, arbitration, or trial transcripts.
Today, we’re proud to introduce PDF Analyzer in preview mode for deposition, arbitration, and trial transcripts. It reads the contents of the PDF, understands the relative positioning of items, figures out what is relevant vs. what is not (e.g., shadows or dust particles on old scans, tilted pages, and so on), and then readies it for further processing. This might include converting it into a clean ASCII text file, which can then be put into our own Summaries engine to generate our acclaimed deposition, arbitration, or trial summaries. Or that same ASCII file could be used to sync a deposition within our high-quality CloudSync platform, then export the load files into trial presentation software to create clips. Or you could place the transcript into your case management software for further organization…the possibilities are endless. And all of this happens at the speed AND quality level that you expect from any Threadeo product.
More Magic
In effect, PDF Analyzer becomes the Enabler for a whole bunch of Alchemists to do what you need them to do. All with the goal of enhancing and accelerating your case preparation in an innovative yet secure and trustworthy manner, and in a manner that was simply not possible until today.
There is so much more to come with PDF Analyzer. Reach out and we’ll be happy to share more.
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Medieval Alchemy, Explained:
(1) The thermite reaction, which occurs when a mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide reacts exothermically to produce molten iron in a spectacular display of heat and light.
(2) The “elephant toothpaste” reaction, a rapid decomposition of hydrogen peroxide using a catalyst, such as potassium iodide, in the presence of soap — to produce a towering, frothy cascade.
(3) The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, a demonstrator of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, uses bromine and an acid mixture to be in flux for very long periods of time.