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ABBYY, Amedia Partnership Creates OCR/Reader App for the Visually Impaired

June 07, 2016

More than 10 different languages supported

ABBYY®, a leading provider of technologies and solutions to action information, has partnered with Japan’s Amedia to create the Amedia Live Reader application – a mobile optical character reader for the visually impaired.

With the integration of the ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine, the Amedia Live Reader uses the camera of an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to scan an image with text before the app reads aloud the text to the user in real-time.

Released initially in Japan, the Amedia Live Reader is now more generally available. Early customers of Amedia Live Reader have used the mobile app in a variety of work/life scenarios, such as reading menus in restaurants and train/bus schedules when traveling, as well as printed materials handed out at business meetings/conferences.

“Amedia chose to partner with ABBYY for the creation of this product because we’re particularly impressed with ABBYY’s ability to support so many languages,” said Yu Mochizuki, president of Amedia Corporation. “By combining both teams, we were able to create an app that is helping improve the lives of visually impaired people around the globe.”

Mochizuki added, “The app is special in that it recognizes characters in complex scenes (such as street signs) and reads these characters aloud in real-time, achieving both accuracy and speed. This is made possible by combining ABBYY OCR technologies and our special image processing technology. To our knowledge, we haven’t seen anything like this in other mobile products, at this affordable price point.”

The ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine is a software development kit (SDK) based on ABBYY’s world-renowned OCR technologies. Its powerful image processing algorithms enable mobile devices to perform highly accurate text recognition.

“We are honored to be part of this breakthrough offering,” said ABBYY North American HQ CEO Dean Tang. “FineReader is known for its assistive learning uses, and this app is an extension of those. Many comparable, yet more expensive, apps aren’t able to support certain languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which is yet another way the Amedia Live Reader beats its competition.”

The Amedia Live Reader is available for purchase on iTunes for $29.99. In order to operate, iOS 8.0 or later is required. Supported languages include English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese and Korean.

About ABBYY

ABBYY is a leading global provider of technologies and solutions that help businesses to action information. The company sets the standard in content capture and innovative language-based technologies that integrate across the information lifecycle. ABBYY solutions are relied on to optimize business processes, mitigate risk, accelerate decision making and drive revenue. ABBYY technologies are used and licensed by some of the largest international enterprises and government organizations, as well as SMBs and individuals. The company maintains offices in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Taiwan, the UAE, the UK, Ukraine, and the United States. For more information, see Key Facts .

ABBYY and the ABBYY Logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby recognized.

Media Contact:

Karbo Communications for ABBYY

abbyy@karbocom.com

Margaret Pereira

+1 925-989-8109

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