Using the Business Card Reader Custom Control in Dynamics 365

Jordan Hohepa, 11 September 2019

Recently it has been announced that there will be a wave of new Artificial Intelligence features being added to Microsoft PowerApps. The AI based features will be simple to add pieces of functionality that can do things like process a form or recognise objects in a picture. This blog covers the ‘Business Card Reader’ which as the name suggests, allows information from a Business Card to be read. This functionality is available as a custom control in Dynamics 365. At the time of writing this blog, these features are only available in Dynamics 365 instances hosted in North America and Europe.

The screenshot above shows the custom control being added onto a form. This is being attached to the employee field which is an out of the box Single Line of Text field that I had renamed to ‘Business Card’ for this example. The Business Card Reader can extract the Full Name, First Name, Last Name and Job Title from a Business Card.

I decided to add the new field to a Quick Create Form, which can be seen in the screenshot above. The ‘Scan business card’ button will allow Users to select an image of a Business Card when selected.

As you can see, the custom control successfully extracted the First Name, Last Name and Job Title from that card, populating the fields which were selected for mapping earlier.