ABBYY has partnered with Japan's Amedia to create the Amedia Live Reader application -- a mobile optical character reader for the visually impaired.

With the integration of the ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine, the Amedia Live Reader uses the camera of an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to scan an image with text before the app reads aloud the text to the user in realtime.

Released initially in Japan, the Amedia Live Reader is now more generally available. Early customers of Amedia Live Reader have used the mobile app in a variety of work/life scenarios, such as reading menus in restaurants and train/bus schedules when traveling, as well as printed materials handed out at business meetings/conferences.

"Amedia chose to partner with ABBYY for the creation of this product because we're particularly impressed with ABBYY's ability to support so many languages," said Yu Mochizuki, president of Amedia Corporation.

"By combining both teams, we were able to create an app that is helping improve the lives of visually impaired people around the globe."

Mochizuki added, "The app is special in that it recognises characters in complex scenes (such as street signs) and reads these characters aloud in realtime, achieving both accuracy and speed. This is made possible by combining ABBYY OCR technologies and our special image processing technology. To our knowledge, we haven't seen anything like this in other mobile products, at this affordable price point."

The ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine is a software development kit (SDK) based on ABBYY's OCR technologies. Its powerful image processing algorithms enable mobile devices to perform highly accurate text recognition.

"We are honoured to be part of this breakthrough offering," said ABBYY North American HQ CEO Dean Tang. "FineReader is known for its assistive learning uses, and this app is an extension of those. Many comparable, yet more expensive, apps aren't able to support certain languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which is yet another way the Amedia Live Reader beats its competition."

The Amedia Live Reader is available for purchase on iTunes for $US29.99. In order to operate, iOS 8.0 or later is required. Supported languages include English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese and Korean.