ABBYY Demonstrates Next-Generation Mobile OCR Utility

ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies, today announced that its sample Business Card Recognition (BCR) utility is now available for the Windows Mobile platform, and will be demonstrated at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Francisco, CA October 23-25, 2007.

The utility is an example of how developers can provide innovative optical character recognition (OCR) and business card reading functionality to mobile devices by leveraging the powerful capabilities of the ABBYY Mobile OCR software development toolkit (SDK). The BCR utility, jointly developed with NewSoft, Inc., showcases the ability to capture business cards using the phone’s built-in digital camera, and extract contact information from the image directly to the telephone address book. The two companies also plan to work together on support for additional Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

“Analyst firm IDC expects Windows Mobile to be on about 22 percent of all smartphones worldwide by 2010, and users will expect increasingly sophisticated capabilities and productivity tools on these devices,” said Dean Tang, president and CEO at ABBYY USA. “The sample BCR utility demonstrates another way that developers can use our SDK to extend the capabilities of these devices with a small software footprint to minimize the use of hardware resources, and provide accurate real-time results.”

The ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK provides developers with straightforward tools to create business card reading applications for mobile imaging devices including camera phones, digital cameras, PDAs, handheld scanners and other camera-based hardware. The sample application supports recognition of business cards in nine languages: English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian. The Mobile OCR SDK supports developers in integrating OCR and business card reading functions into mobile platforms and applications. The SDK offers a truly OS-independent technology to support integration into any mobile platform including the Brew, Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems. 

Detailed information on licensing models and pricing, as well as other technical information, about ABBYY Mobile OCR SDK are available from ABBYY.

About NewSoft

NewSoft connects creativity with its array of award-winning image, video, DVD, and WLAN software. Focusing on integrating hardware and software so it can provide the best solutions for its worldwide partners and customers, NewSoft is well known for its advanced technology, innovative design and diverse product lines. More information on NewSoft can be found on the Web at http://www.newsoftinc.com/.