OREANDA-NEWS. December 13, 2012. ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies and services, today announced the availability of FineReader® Touch for iPhone®, an innovative optical character recognition (OCR) and document conversion application designed specifically for Apple® iOS. ABBYY FineReader Touch for iPhone allows users to photograph paper documents with the device’s camera while on the go, quickly upload images to the ABBYY cloud OCR service for recognition and conversion and then save or share the output files in popular editable and searchable formats. A compact client application, FineReader Touch takes up little resources on a mobile device yet ensures superior accuracy of document conversion by leveraging the full capacity of cloud-based OCR.

“OCR technologies are gaining wider use and becoming more and more popular in the mobile space. With the new product, ABBYY is answering the growing demand for a mobile solution that can effectively digitize multi-page paper documents”, said Katya Sontseva, director of Mobile Products department at ABBYY. “Now users of Apple mobile devices can benefit from the outstanding accuracy of document recognition ABBYY FineReader has been acclaimed for.”

ABBYY FineReader Touch for iPhone adds new value to Apple mobile devices turning them, should the situation require, into powerful document recognition tools. While outside the office or home, users can use the program to quickly and precisely reproduce important documents in popular formats such as Microsoft® Word, Excel®, searchable PDF (PDF/A), RTF, TXT, and ODT, rather than just photograph them. Images of documents can be either captured with the iPhone camera or uploaded directly from the device’s photo album. When sent to the online OCR service, separate pages of a document can be combined together into one consistent output file.

Through integration with the ABBYY cloud-based OCR service, the mobile application delivers the same high-quality results of text recognition as the full desktop version of ABBYY FineReader. The product supports text recognition in 42 languages including multilingual documents. With its ability to accurately re-create formatting attributes (e.g. headings, images, bulleted and numbered lists, columns, and tables) and original layout of documents, iPhone users can now quickly and accurately digitize various document types including brochures, magazines, books, contracts, reports, timetables and more, turning them into editable electronic files.

The product’s intuitive interface provides a range of one-click options for easy export, sharing and archiving of the resulting files. Output files can be stored in the internal archive of FineReader Touch with convenient search functions. Then users can send them to a desktop computer or other device via email and iTunes® File Sharing or export them directly to online storage services. Files can also be transferred to external applications and opened with a single tap in a text editor, a PDF reader or other similar app installed on the device.

Corporate users and mobile workers will benefit from ABBYY FineReader Touch for iPhone while on the go or in any situation when they need to quickly and accurately digitize paper documents. It will help them improve the efficiency of their business processes, since now they are less dependable on scanners or computers.

Availability and Pricing

ABBYY FineReader Touch for iPhone is available via the Apple App Store® (accessible through iTunes®). It offers flexible page-by-page payment schemes with a large number of "free pages" for document processing included in the basic package upon registration.