ABBYY Launches Business Card Reader for Android

MILPITAS, Calif., Jan. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services, today announced the availability of its Business Card Reader for Android®. The Android application rounds out ABBYY's support of the major smartphone platforms, including Symbian and Apple iOS. The application enables users to accurately transfer contact information from paper business cards into their Android phone's address book. The solution also allows users to search for additional information about new contacts across popular social networks and Google Maps.

The new product reads text in nineteen languages including popular European languages such as English, German, French, Italian and Russian, providing business users with an efficient way to process both unilingual and multilingual business cards. Leveraging the device's camera and ABBYY's award-winning mobile OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, the application intelligently locates contact data within a business card and saves it into the corresponding data fields. It allows users to not only create new contact records, but also quickly update existing ones with newly obtained information. The software simplifies the checking of captured data by highlighting uncertain characters in the resulting text and displaying the original photo for visual comparison.

ABBYY Business Card Reader offers a simple and efficient way to learn more about a company or individual via the ability to search across social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook directly from within the application. It also allows users to look up a new address captured from a business card with Google Maps, without requiring it to be saved in the mobile address book. "Business Card Reader for Android does more than simple contact reading – it gives users an efficient way to acquire, store and manage valuable business information," added Katya Solntseva, director of mobile products department at ABBYY.

ABBYY Business Card Reader for Android will also be available in a free, lite version that will allow users to capture data on a business card, preview the results on a phone's display, and search for additional information on Facebook. The lite version will transfer the contact's first name, last name and first detected phone number. The remaining contact data can be saved into the address book by upgrading to the full version.

Availability and Specifications

ABBYY Business Card Reader for Android is now available via the Google Android Market. Supported user interface languages include English and Russian. For more information about ABBYY Business Card Reader, including the product's system specifications and a full list of recognition languages, visit www.abbyy.com/bcr_android.  

About ABBYY

ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. ABBYY Language Services provides comprehensive linguistic solutions to corporate customers. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY solutions to automate time- and labour-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects such as those of Australian Taxation Office, Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Education of Russia, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, and Montgomery County Government of the USA. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world's top manufacturers such as BenQ, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, Plustek, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the United States, Ukraine, the UK, Japan and Taiwan. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com.

ABBYY, the ABBYY Logo, FineReader, ADRT, Lingvo, FlexiCapture, Recognition Server, and PDF Transformer are either registered trademarks or trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby recognized.

SOURCE ABBYY