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It gives you the chance to correct any text that might have been picked up incorrectly it lets you change the label on a field (so if it thought a number was a business number, it's a simple action to change it to a home number) and it handily highlights anything it is worried about in red. The chance to scan over the scanned results before adding it your data works on so many levels.
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Add in the trivials and it will rise to about one in ten that you would need to edit - the free one day demo will let you know if you can put up with these or not!Īnd, while the results were imperfect, this isn't as big a problem as you might think. I'd say that if you ignore trivial errors then the accuracy is about the aforementioned one in fifty rate. Most cards had only one error that I could see, which was the first name field almost always picked up the whole name, so if I was being strict I would have to cut and paste the surname to a new field, and there were a few instances (maybe one time in fifty) where a company name or email was duplicated over two fields, but it was a quick fix in the edit screen before saving. Testing my big stack of cards from South by Southwest this year (admittedly that was in March, and I've ‘processed' them into the big round filing cabinet already), the results were very strongly in favour of continuing to keep the application on my phone. Hit the cursor button, the application grabs a temporary picture of the card in front of it, and (this is where the magic happens) you are presented with an entry that you can save directly into your Contacts database.Ībbyy is not perfect - in fact I've still to see any optical character recognition system that's perfect, especially one that has to parse not just the letters, but infer meaning from them to pop them in the right fields in your database. So what does it do? It takes over the camera of your S60 device, and you hold your phone over a business card.
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It is unobtrusive, useful and simple to use. Highly targeted for a specific use-case, which it does incredibly well before returning to lurk in a folder until it is needed again. Now this is what applications should be like on your mobile phone.
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Or you could thank Abbyy for their Business Card Reader software on your S60 phone.
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Maybe you could hire a small house-trained Llama to type them all into your computer. You could go through them looking for a quickly penciled note and just get in touch with the people that you promised to get back to (you did put a star on their card for this reason, didn't you?). The first is to throw them all away and hope that the person that promised to get back to you actually will get back to you.
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You've got a couple of options in how to deal with these. You'll also have the same problem as I have when I get home, and that's a stack of business cards about two inches high. There are certain clichés that go round the All About Symbian offices - one of them is that I tend to jet off to conferences around the world, and if any of you have been at the conferences I've been at, please don't tell the News of the World.
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