ABBYY
Back to Newsroom

Texthelp™ Embraces ABBYY’s Cloud OCR to Enable Easy Document Access in Classrooms

September 17, 2015
ShutterStock

ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies, today announced that its ABBYY Cloud OCR is gaining popularity among customers. Texthelp, a long-term ABBYY customer and the market leader in assistive software for the education sector in both the UK and North America, has incorporated ABBYY’s Cloud-based OCR (optical character recognition) technology to perform text recognition in its Snapverter™ product. Snapverter is one of the newest additions to Texthelp’s portfolio of apps and extensions for Google Apps for Education users.

ABBYY have been a trusted partner of Texthelp’s for many years and we have used their OCR software development kits as core components of our products,” says Martin McKay, Chief Technology Officer for Texthelp.  “We remain at the forefront of innovative software development, supporting students in learning to read, write, study and communicate with ease. Accordingly, we continuously seek out best-of-class technologies like ABBYY’s Cloud OCR to help us bring first-rate products to market.

Snapverter is a handy new add-on tool for Texthelp’s ‘Read&Write for Google Chrome’ software that transforms classroom papers and files into accessible PDF documents. Teachers can simply point a smartphone at any document and snap a picture with the camera. The content is then sent to ABBYY’s cloud where the images are processed and converted into an accessible file for easy sharing with students within their Google Drive.  This Cloud-to-Cloud solution cleverly recognises text from a variety of documents and files and then makes it accessible to be read aloud by Texthelp’s extension for ‘Read&Write for Google Chrome’. Whether it is text from worksheets, handouts, book pages, photocopies, or other paper based materials from the classroom - even photos, charts and diagrams - everything is included in the resulting PDF, which is stored in the user’s Google Drive. Snapverter can also convert Bookshare® digital publications in DAISY format to make an accessible EPUB file for reading aloud.

The ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK is a flexible and scalable on-line service for developers, system integrators and ISVs that allows them to easily enhance their applications by adding industry leading OCR, ICR and checkmark recognition functionalities. This platform-agnostic toolkit is based on ABBYY’s OCR and PDF conversion technologies - the same core technology as used in ABBYY’s award-winning FineReader products. With industry-leading image pre-processing technologies, ABBYY’s OCR easily recognises even low-quality scans and images captured with mobile device optics. ABBYY’s document recognition technologies are licensed by leading imaging and document capture solution vendors, as well as scanning and MFP manufacturers across the globe. They help organisations, from Fortune 100 enterprises to government agencies, enhance business processes, expedite transactions, and create a more efficient workflow.

“We put great emphasis on developing the best document conversion technologies and work closely with leading organisations to tailor our products to best fit their needs,” says Sven Diedrich, director of the technology licensing business unit at ABBYY Europe. “We are honoured that a long-standing customer like Texthelp once again decided to integrate our technology in a new and innovative way by incorporating our Cloud OCR into their Snapverter product.”

To obtain a free developer licence of ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK and test for yourself, please go to:

 http://ocrsdk.com/

Schools and colleges with Read&Write for Google Chrome licences can try Snapverter for free by installing it from the Chrome Web Store

About ABBYY

ABBYY UK is a member of the ABBYY Group and supports sales and marketing activities in Western Europe. ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, and development tools. ABBYY offers Professional Services to help customers implementing business solutions based on ABBYY’s products. Paper-intensive organisations from all over the world use ABBYY solutions 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, Montgomery County Government of the USA and the Government of Canada. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, KnowledgeLake, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world’s top manufacturers such as Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, PFU, Plustek, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is an international company with offices in Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Ukraine, Cyprus, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com

ABBYY, the ABBYY Logo and ABBYY FineReader are either registered trademarks or trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd. Texthelp, and Snapverter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Texthelp Limited. Google and Chrome are registered trademarks of Google Inc. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.Bookshare is a registered trademark of Beneficient Technology Inc. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby recognised.

For more information, please contact:

ABBYY Europe GmbH

Elsenheimerstrasse 49

80687 Munich, Germany

Tel.: +49 (0) 89 69 33 33 - 0

E-Mail: press_eu@abbyy.com

Web: www.ABBYY.com

About Texthelp

Texthelp believes that everyone shares a fundamental need to be understood by others, and language is our passport to academic, social and professional success. This is what drives Texthelp to create smart, easy-to-use support technologies that enable young people and adults read and write with confidence and independence and to benefit from the English language.

Texthelp works with leading technology companies including Google and Microsoft, and works closely together with many of the world's major educational publishers to provide bespoke literacy support solutions to classrooms worldwide.

Texthelp's world leading assistive and language learning software is used daily by students and educators in schools, colleges and universities worldwide. Our corporate software tools continue to be used by blue-chip companies, as well as large and small scale public departments and government organisations and agencies globally. Texthelp has been recognised in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for 14 consecutive years.

 

www.texthelp.com

                                      

Connect with us