ABBYY rings in OCR on the iPhone

March 26, 2009:ABBYY is making the tools available for developers to create optical character recognition (OCR) applications for the iPhone and other mobile devices

Its Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 software development kit (SDK) Release 3 will feature support for building applications that automatically transform images of text and documents captured with a camera into editable and searchable text, eliminating the need to input information manually.

For example, using a camera phone with an OCR application, business cards, clippings from magazines, books, receipts, ads and other documents can be captured and automatically converted into text, which may then be edited, stored or sent via email orSMS. It can also be used in other mobile and PC applications including notepads, calendars and so on.

“iPhone’s developer community has been growing very rapidly and there are tens of thousands of applications available for this platform worldwide today,” said KatyaSolntseva, director of mobile products department at ABBYY.

“In order to be competitive, application developers need new, unique features which are truly useful for a broad audience. With ABBYY’s Mobile OCR Engine SDK, developers can create solutions ranging from simple business card reading applications that automatically store the contact information on the mobile phone’s address book, to more complex business tools which support integration with various enterprise solutions such as CRM or ECM. The possibilities for mobile solutions are endless.”

The ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK also supports many popular mobile platforms, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, and Android.

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