Siri Shortcuts support (for PDF OCR)

DEVONthink
1

Hey all,

I got a unique situation where I believe having Siri Shortcuts would help immensely.

I have a NAS where I store all of my important documents, and it’s surfaced in two ways:

  • indexed by DevonTHINK
  • surfaced by a paperless-ng server

I want to create a workflow where I can just “share” a pdf to a Siri shortcut which would:

  • send the pdf to DevonTHINK to OCR
  • with the OCR’ed pdf output, I can upload it to my NAS
  • DevonTHINK will pick it up on the next reindex
  • paperless will pick it up when pdf is placed on the NAS

Now this is just a generic workflow, but enables a lot of cool different workflow possibilities.

Now I know paperless-ng comes with OCR capabilities but I find them sub-par compared to ABBYY that DevonTHINK uses. With important documents, quality of the OCR is top priority for me.

Is this currently possible using x-callback URL’s? My biggest concern is, for these specific PDFs, I don’t want to store the pdf into a DevonTHINK database. Just index them.

2

DEVONthink doesn’t support such callbacks or shortcuts on the Mac. AppleScript, JXA and smart rules are recommended instead (and AppleScript/JXA can be used in shortcuts too).

2 Likes
3

Using AppleScript definitely looks like it can solve my problem more or less, but I believe this requires DevonTHINK to be opened, correct? One advantage of Siri Shortcuts integration is theoretically it will “just work” without the app needing to be opened.

Regardless, it seems like I’m off to learn apple script. Thanks for answering my question!

4

That’s right.

5

I am new to DevonThink and recently chose it to handle my documents over paperless-ng - I think that DT can do all the filing you want paperless-ng to do, but I’m not positive?

6

DevonTHINK is clearly the more powerful software that can do all that paperless-ng(x) can do. However I need to access my documents anywhere including my Windows machine. Now unfortunately, the server edition would be nice but I have a Mac Laptop, so it’s not online 24/7 like my NAS is. Therefore, it makes sense for me to use the NAS/paperless-ngx for availabiltiy and DevonThink on the laptop for the power.

7

Ah, got it - that makes sense. Best of luck!