Since its invention more than half a century ago, computers have become a part of our daily lives. Many tasks can be reduced to a series of computations and therein lies the reason for the ever increasing pervasiveness of computers. Tasks that need to be executed repeatedly on a large scale are often ripe for automation.

However, automating tasks is traditionally done via programming and this requires people to learn a computer language to communicate and instruct the computer. Learning a new programming language or a new application can be daunting, especially for non-technically savvy folks. That means the majority of us. TagUI, a free Robotics Process Automation (RPA) tool by AI Singapore, hopes to revolutionise automation by getting the computer to understand human languages instead.

For TagUI, bots are built as text expressed in a human language. For example,

type search-bar as hello world

types “hello world’ into a web input search bar, and

click search-button

clicks the search button on the webpage.

Easy enough to understand, even if you have never programmed before, right?

With such intuitive ease of use, bots can be easily shared with and edited by your teammates. Anyone can access these bots with their favourite text editor, such as Microsoft Word, Notepad++ and more. With TagUI’s new Microsoft Word and Excel Add-ins, users can even create, edit, deploy their RPA bots in MS Word, and define data for batch automation in Excel (link).

With this foundation, it is not surprising that TagUI can already understand commands in over 20 different human languages, bringing down the barrier to automation and democratising the use of RPA in over 80 countries. This would not have been possible without contributions from the community of users. The video below shows how you can use the four official languages of Singapore – English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil – to automate the task of getting a list of stock prices from Google.

Interested to know more? Get started with TagUI here!