Scan your business cards, recognize them and convert them into an address database. Enter calling cards without the time-consuming task of retyping them - think of your last exhibition when you came back with an entire stack of business cards and it took your secretary two days to encode them!
Readiris smoothly complements such applications as contact managers, databases or even wordprocessors whose mail merge function allows to print letters, envelopes and labels.
The business cardÆs data is extracted automatically from the image and the recognized data is assigned to specific database fields.
Readiris extensively uses a knowledge database, thus acquiring the necessary intelligence to discriminate the first and last name, a city and its state, a telephone and a fax number etc.
When the character string ôJohn Williamsö gets read, Readiris ôknowsö that John is a first name and Williams a last name. In the same way so does the system recognize titles such as ôvice presidentö and ôengineerö, cities such as Boise and Chicago, states such as Oregon and Maryland etc.
Each country has a different ôstyleö of composing business cards.
Americans compose an address differently than the French do, Dutch ZIP codes and telephone numbers have a different syntax than their British counterparts etc.
The ôlayoutö factor explains why the Language-Card Style button offers linguistically irrelevant choices such as ôFrenchö and ôBelgian Frenchö: the language is the same, the style of the business cards isnÆt!
When the business card reading mode is enabled, the list of supported ôlanguagesö changes!
This works in no less than 28 languages.
All American and European card styles are supported, including Turkish, Greek, Russian and Eastern-European business cards.
The field analysis comprises a third task: Readiris not only analyzes but also formats the recognized text.
The system filters all irrelevant data from a business card, even if they play an active role!
If your business card mentions the information ôTelephone: (508) 898-42 89ö, the resulting output will be ô5088984289ö in the telephone field. The word ôtelephoneö is dropped, even if Readiris made good use of it to detect the location of the telephone number.
The brackets, the hyphen and the spaces within the telephone number are also deleted.
When business card reading is a major application - youÆre, say, scanning a great many business cards on a booth at a fair -, you can use I.R.I.S.Æs dedicated business card scanner IBCR-II.
Calibrate the USB-based scanner with a white business card when youÆre invited to do so.
Select the scanning resolution - a resolution of 400 dpi is recommended.
You can scan several business cards simultaneously on the scannerÆs flatbed and have them split up by the software.
Use the command Extract Business Card(s) (under the Process menu) and youÆll ôsplit upö the overall images in the actual card images, throwing away the superfluous black border.
The background must be black if Readiris is to extract the various business cards.