ABBYY Brings OCR Capabilities to iPhone Developers

ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software, today announced that its Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 software development kit (SDK) Release 3 will feature support for the Apple(R) iPhone(R). ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine provides powerful tools for developers to create optical character recognition (OCR) applications for mobile or other compact devices.

ABBYY's OCR technology automatically transforms 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 or SMS. 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 Katya Solntseva, 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."

Moreover, because the ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK supports many popular mobile platforms, including Windows(R) Mobile, Symbian(R), Linux(R), Android and now iPhone, developers will benefit from using the same OCR technology to create high quality applications for a variety of platforms and devices. This minimizes the developers' dilemma to use SDKs from different providers for different platforms.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 was designed with the needs of mobile solution providers in mind, combining strong platform support with powerful technology innovations to optimize software performance and accuracy, while minimizing its footprint on hardware resources. The SDK provides powerful recognition capabilities including intelligent analysis algorithm to ensure accurate and fast OCR processing, advanced capabilities to reproduce the structure of original text and a range of image pre-processing features such as skew correction and image binarization.

ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK recognizes text in 58 languages including Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters, enabling creation of multilingual solutions. In addition, integrated business card reader dictionaries for 16 languages and their business card formats are also available as part of the SDK.

ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine was recently awarded the Silver Mobile Star from MobileVillage(R) for the Best Enterprise Software: Data Capture/Collection.

About ABBYY

ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software. 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. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY software 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.