With Snabiz, the camera of the iPhone turns into a OCR-capable scanner! Take photos of signs and business cards and Snabiz recognizes all the text in the photo. It is even smart enough to recognize different fields in a business card, so taking a photo of a business card, you can directly have it saved in your contacts.
Snabiz employs an algorithm to get rid of blurriness and reduce the effect of shaking, and makes use of the open-source Tesseract OCR engine, which is said to be one of the most accurate engines around.
Created by developer from Belgium, it is currently available from the App Store.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Have you tried it? How well does it work? I’ve tried taking pictures of business cards with my iPhone’s camera and due to the fact that it can’t do macro focus, I can never get a clear enough picture that I can read, let alone some OCR software.
Looks good in a screenshot but the iPhone is notoriously bad at close-up photos. I would be really surprised if the app works as well as advertised. The iPhone lens just can’t focus closer then a couple feet.
Attention: The best results when scanning business cards are achieved using an additional lens for the iPhone camera.
We recommend the close-up lens of the Clarifi-case, made by Griffin Technology.