Autofill product
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This guide presents a technical overview of Onfido's Autofill product.
Introduction
Onfido's Autofill product provides a fully automated data extraction and classification solution for identity documents. Autofill extracts data from documents uploaded by an applicant and immediately returns the document information. Supporting more than 1800 documents, this optical character recognition (OCR) solution can be used to automatically prefill sign-up forms, verify extracted data against databases and automatically classify documents.
Note: As extraction is done on a best-effort basis and information varies across different documents, none of the data properties are guaranteed to be present in the response.
Use cases
Autofill has a number of use cases, including:
- automatically prefilling sign-up forms
- verifying extracted data against databases
- light identity document verification (extraction-only)
- automatically classifying identity documents
As an example, the following steps demonstrate a typical ID document-based registration flow using Autofill:
- A user uploads a document
- Onfido automatically classifies and extracts the data from the document
- The user sees pre-populated extracted data in their registration form
- The user can then check and edit the form if needed, before being onboarded
Note: The "Check your details" and "Set up your account" screens above are for illustrative purposes only, demonstrating how extracted data can be used. Autofill screens are not generated automatically by Onfido's SDKs.
Extraction results
Autofill extraction results contain both the document classification and extracted data:
Document classification
- The issuing country of the document
- The type of the document
- The issuing state of the document
Extracted data (where available)
- Document number
- All names on the document
- Gender
- Date of birth
- Date of expiry
- Nationality
- MRZ data
- Address information
- Issuing authority
- Issue date
- Personal number
- Place of birth
If the document is issued by a country subject to comprehensive US sanctions, Autofill will only return classification data.
More details regarding Autofill's extracted data can be found in our API reference documentation.
Autofill task
To implement Autofill as part of your identify verification flows, an Autofill task should be added to a Studio workflow from the Workflow Builder
The Autofill task output depends on the data extracted from the input document. As such, an Autofill task must always be included along a workflow route that follows a Document Capture task.
It is important to note that because Autofill data extraction is done on a best-effort basis, where information varies across different documents, none of the data properties are guaranteed to be present in the response. As such, the data extracted from an Autofill task should not be used or relied upon as input for Logic task conditions in a Studio workflow.
Below you will find an illustrated example of a Studio workflow running an Autofill task:
More information about report tasks can be found in our Studio Product Guide.
Recommended usage
Autofill is designed as a triaging tool, a first layer for filtering certain data, classifying identity documents and funnelling customers along the most appropriate verification flow. As highlighted above, data extraction is done on a best-effort basis, and as such, extraction of data properties is not guaranteed.
With this in mind, Onfido recommends that Autofill only be used for identity document classification and light data and document verification where a comprehensive document check is not required.
Autofill should not be used for critical decision making or instances where a high level of accuracy is required. Onfido recommends a Document Report for such use cases.
