Snabiz, the first OCR application for iPhone

Snap your contacts

Snabiz helps you to import business cards in your Address Book.
Simply take a picture, Snabiz recognizes the text and
automatically tags all known fields.
You are presented with a list of all scanned text fields
so you can tag everything that you want to import.
Then you can save your new contact in your Address Book.

Features

• take a clear picture thanks to the built-in CameraSteady functionality (3 second countdown with sound effect prior to taking the final picture)
• automatic field detection (phone numbers, address, zipcode, ..) + possibility to overrule them
• shake to clear all detected fields
• Snabiz is using the Tesseract OCR engine (licensed under Apache License 2.0), which is considered one of the most accurate free software OCR engines currently available

Walkthrough

When you start the application, the startup screen is shown.

When you click on the snapshot button, the camera view opens (in landscape mode!) and allows you to take a picture of a business card (or any other picture which we can scan/OCR).

When you pressed the "Take Picture" button, Snabiz will start a countdown from 3 to 0 (with sound effect!) in order to help you take a picture without moving your iPhone (sharp picture!).

Snabiz also allows to use a photo from your photo library (e.g. in case you're using an iPod Touch).

After you took your picture (or selected a photo from the Photo Library), Snabiz will start to do its work, and will show a processing animation.

The OCR process might take up to 15 seconds, so please be patient. Once the OCR process is done, Snabiz presents you with a list of scanned text and tries to suggest the correct fields for each text.

You can manually edit OCR mistakes (which occur from time to time -even our software isn't bulletproof ;-)), or change the suggested field. Detected fields are shown in orange, fields you selected yourself are shown in green. All entries which have a valid field will be used to add as contact information, entries with field Unknown are ignored.

If you don't like the result (i.e. you took a bad picture), you can quickly clear all fields by shaking the iPhone

Finally, you can click the Save button, and Snabiz will allow you to add the entries to a new or an existing contact!

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.