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Business card recognition isn’t something new, as it’s a service you’ll find on many mobile phones – Windows Mobile 6.5 came with it as standard, even – but doing business card recognition well on the other hand, that’s something one doesn’t always find.  Step forward ABBYY Business Card Reader (iTunes link), an app for the iPhone which aims to change that.  By the way, according to the company’s website, that clunky ABBYY name can be translated from its hypothetical language to ‘keen eye’.  We’d have rather they just called it that, to be honest!

To use ABBYY effectively, you’re going to need an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 3G inside Griffin’s Clarifi case. The iTunes blurb doesn’t state that the app is compatible with the iPhone 4’s camera, but we can confirm it works perfectly well with iOS 4.

Here’s the scenario: you’ve had a day of meetings and have come back with a stack of business cards and entering them into your phone contacts is the last thing you want to be doing.  So you fire up ABBYY, snap a picture and hit confirm to send the details to your contact file.  Like this, all your cards would be done in moments.  That’s the dream, so does ABBYY make it a reality?

To find out we did two tests.  The first was with a 3GS and a collection of hotel and restaurant business cards.  These are often problematic to scan due to the use of graphics and unusual fonts, usually making the actual text rather small.  It performed rather well.  The card can be photographed in portrait or landscape and once the picture is taken, a progress bar shows the few seconds needed for the OCR software to analyze it.  Here are the results of our first test:

• All six had the names and URLs correctly recognized.
• Five had the correct email addresses.
• Five had the correct telephone numbers.
• Only three had the correct postal addresses.
• Of the three that had a job title, only one was added correctly.

In the case of the email and telephone number corrections, one card’s format of an international dialing code foxed it and the email address was probably down to a slightly blurry picture.  The postal addresses on all but one of the cards were Greek but written using Latin characters, so the odd spelling mistake was perhaps to be expected.  Overall, using ABBYY and correcting the mistakes was still much quicker than typing them all in manually.

Our second test was a little more cunning.  This time we used an iPhone 3G with a DIY close-up lens, making the pictures a little distorted in terms of text size and totally abandoning regular business card layouts.   Our reason for doing all this was that if the app worked here, it should perform in any situation!  To make things even more of a challenge, we added in some Greek language cards, as ABBYY has the ability to recognize 17 different languages – all selected in a separate menu – but Greek happened to be listed as a new addition in version 2.0, so let’s see how it does.

• Greek language card was 100% correct, with name, address and telephone number all recognized.
• A card with an unusual name was also picked up correctly, along with the phone number and address, despite the bad picture using the DIY lens.  Here it didn’t pick up the job title correctly though.
• A card deliberately snapped in lowlight produced a surprising result too, with the name, telephone and email all recognized correctly.

We didn’t really expect ABBYY to do very well here, as the ‘lens’ was a very dodgy affair, but we think it did really well considering!  We have pictured the results of the unusual name and the Greek text here.

Using ABBYY BCR is simple too, with only a few settings  – a toggle for saving the business card picture or not, language recognition and which contact fields the app should look for – to worry about, a shutter release button and pressing Done after you’ve edited any fields.  The interface is clean and well laid out, and we liked the color scheme.  This ease and quickness of use is essential in this type of app, and we are pleased to see an absence of unnecessary bells and whistles.

There are three things which we did let ABBYY down, but they are small issues that aren’t related to the actual capture of business card information.  The first is that when saving business card pictures, they show up in your iPhone’s camera roll, but not in iPhoto when you sync it.  A small concern for us, but we can see how it may cause problems for others.

The other two problems relate to the camera view.  Firstly, the shutter release button is too small and half the size of the regular one in the iPhone’s camera app.  Keeping the phone steady to take a picture and then having to be so precise with the button was a pain in our ‘test’, so it could be even worse in the real world.  Secondly, when taking a picture, the screen is covered with helpful advice including at the top, bottom and two lines right across the middle.  This is distracting and would benefit from at least the two central lines fading out after a moment.

These things aside, ABBYY did exactly what it was supposed to do, and performed admirably in our entirely unscientific tests!  There are three versions available, one for free which doesn’t save any data in your contacts, a Lite version for $0.99/£0.59 which saves name and phone number, plus the full version for a hefty $9.99/£5.99, which contains all the features described in our review.

Overall: 3.5/5