Google has a new useful app in its arsenal for those who want a complete way to scan, store, and organize important documents. Dubbed Stack, the app is developed by the company’s Area 120 division — the team behind old favorites like Reply and Grasshopper.
Stack is effectively a scanner app with an AI twist. It lets users scan important documents, receipts, or bills using the smartphone camera. The app also uses Google’s language recognition and optical character recognition smarts to name it and suggest its correct category automatically. These categories, obviously called “stacks,” are effectively virtual filing cabinets.
The app also extracts other vital details from documents, like account numbers, totals due from bills, and due dates. This feature makes the figures and text easier to copy across to other apps, messages, or mails. Integrated search also allows users to trawl through documents using keywords.
The idea for Stack comes from Christopher Pedregal, who previously co-founded the edtech startup Socratic, which was acquired by Google back in 2018. Pedregal notes that, at Socratic, they had taken advantage of Google’s computer vision and language understanding technologies to make learning easier for high school students.
While at Google, he began to think about how those same technologies could be put to work for better organizing documents. To experiment with the idea, he teamed up with Matthew Cowan. The two first worked together on DocAI, a team in Google Cloud that was developing AI technology that could analyze billions of documents.
They realized that they could also apply DocAI’s enterprise technology to users’ personal documents, which led to the creation of Stack. With the Stack app, initially available for Android, users can take a photo of a document and the app will automatically name it and “stack” it into the correct category — like Bills, Banking, House, IDs, Immigration, Insurance, Legal, Medical, Pet, Receipts, Tax, Travel, Vehicles and Work.
Users can add multiple pages when scanning a document, and Stack will OCR all the pages in a document, so that the full text of the document is searchable. Users can also star their most important scans for quicker access.
While the ability to quickly digitize documents by photographing them isn’t new — Microsoft has offered Office Lens for years, for example — Stack will also be able to identify key information from within the documents, like the “due date” on a bill, the “total amount due” or “account number.” It can then pull that info out to make it easier to find later on.
The app additionally allows users to search through the full text of the documents, not just the title, to find the information they need. To keep the items protected, Stack’s documents can be secured by either your fingerprint or face scan, similar to how Google Drive works today. And Drive users can have all their scans automatically synced over to Google Drive.
Google says the app is currently available on Android, as a free download with no in-app purchases. Based on user feedback, Google will decide whether to bring Stack to more platforms, like iOS.
Stack is only available for those in the US at the moment. There’s no word from Google when the app will be available in other regions. As it’s an experimental app, there’s also no promise that Google will continue to support Stack well into the future. Nevertheless, you can grab it on the Google Play Store via the below button.
