ABBYY Announces Business Card Reader Application for Nokia Smartphones

ABBYY announces the availability of Business Card Reader 2.0 for Nokia® smartphones running on Symbian® S60. The application transfers contact information from business cards directly to the mobile phone’s address book.

New Application Transfers All Contact Information from Business Cards Directly into Mobile Device Eliminating the Need for Manual Typing

ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic software, today announced the worldwide availability of Business Card Reader 2.0 for Nokia® smartphones running on Symbian® S60. The new application transfers contact information from business cards directly to the mobile phone’s address book by using the smartphone camera and ABBYY’s text recognition technology. It helps people save the time and effort typically spent on typing in names, phone numbers, e-mails and other key information. To add new contacts, users simply start the program on their device and take a picture of a business card. The program reads this picture, automatically extracts contact data and enters the information into the appropriate fields of the mobile address book.

“This simple yet efficient application promises to be of great use and value to business professionals and anyone who communicates with many people in work and personal life”, said Katya Solntseva, director of mobile products department at ABBYY. “What makes the application truly stand out is the accuracy and intelligence it delivers when extracting contact information from images of business cards. It allows users to get all information from business cards quickly saved in their phone book, rather than just the names and phone numbers people usually type in manually.”

ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0 intelligently locates different types of contact information which can be found on a business card, such as First Name, Last Name, Company, Title, Telephone Numbers, Fax, E-mail, Web site and more. All these data types can be saved automatically to the corresponding fields of a phone book without the need for further reorganization of the obtained data. At the same time, it provides additional options allowing users to edit, change or add new fields. Users can also add a photograph of a given contact person.

ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0 recognizes business cards in 16 languages including English, German, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Norwegian (both Bokmal and Nynorsk), Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

The product has an easy-to-use, intuitive interface suitable for touch screen and keypad based smartphones. Helpful tool tips are also included to guide users to get the best results. To ensure the proper conditions for photographing business cards with a digital camera, ABBYY Business Card Reader automatically monitors the camera lens and includes controls for camera flash within the application.

Underlining the new application is ABBYY’s award-winning optical character recognition (OCR) technology for mobile devices, which was previously introduced to the market with ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0. This innovative OCR technology accurately “reads” printed text on images and photos captured with a digital camera and converts it into text files which can be edited, saved, and republished. ABBYY Mobile OCR technology delivers the appropriate balance between powerful recognition capabilities and the fast performance required for mobile applications. 

Specifications and System Requirements

• Supported devices: Nokia smartphones (for the detailed list of supported devices, please visit https://pdf.abbyy.com/products/mobile/business-card-reader/en/).
• User interface: available in English, German and Russian.
• Operating systems:  Symbian OS S60 v. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4.
• Memory requirements: 10 to 20 MB RAM depending on the number of enabled recognition languages. 15 MB internal memory or storage card space for installation.
• Camera requirements: 2 megapixels or higher, autofocus.

Availability

ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0 will be sold via the online store at www.abbyy.com and through ABBYY’s partners allowing users to choose a time-limited or full license to run the program. A free, time-limited trial version is available for download. For more information about ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0, visit www.ABBYY.com/bcr.

About ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0

ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0 is developed using the ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine 3.0 software development kit (SDK) as a technology platform. This SDK gives developers powerful tools for creating mobile or other compact-code applications enhanced with OCR and business card recognition (BCR) functions. ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine offers a truly OS-independent technology to support integration into a wide range of mobile platforms including Windows® Mobile, Linux, Symbian, Android®, iPhone® and more. It combines strong platform support with powerful technology innovations to optimize software accuracy and performance, while minimizing its footprint on hardware resources. ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine recently received the Silver Mobile Star Award from MobileVillage® for the Best Enterprise Software: Data Capture/Collection. To learn more about the product, please visit www.ABBYY.com.