ABBYY FineReader

Commentaires: For anyone in the finance industry, it is now simply understood that numbers are no longer "crunched" by overworked accountants battling customer-driven deadlines. That is all gone by way of automation. The only hang-up to a seamless input into automation is the fact that much of it still is stored as paper, believe it or not. My firm in particular made a push to start digitizing all of our records and in this process, I learned much about OCR technology. There are hundreds of products that say they can OCR, but the fact that ABBYY can process a HUGE variety of documents, fonts, etc. , this saves a lot of time correcting the output and actually getting searchable documents onto file storage. I just hope that this product continues to develop and remains at its reasonable price point.

Avantages: It literally helped my firm save HUNDREDS of man-hours of data entry by running all of our scanned documents through ABBYY and relying heavily upon its OCR to produce a variety of formats which we were able to quickly cross verify and enter into the accounting software. In short, the quality and intelligence of their OCR engine is tremendously accurate and fast!

Inconvénients: The licensing stuff is a little TOO strict and often the remote licensing procedure has to be manually restarted within WIndows Services. We eventually bought more licenses after realizing that ABBYY will be a critical component in my firm's efforts to digitize all of our records and hard copies onto our cloud-hosted server. However, for a very small business that may not warrant another license purchase, they will quickly find out that ABBYY is quick to detect multiple sessions of the same serial code and will block both out. A little excessive, but I can understand their strict use and protection of this fine product.

Commentaires: If you need to work with documents, this is a great tool for recognition, digitalization and conversion. Price is high and it uses high resources on a computer. If you have a high volume of documents to work with, this is a great tool.

Avantages: Abbyy FineReader support for almost all languages is impressive. We use many different languages, so it is very important for us to have a tool that can recognize well.
It is easy to use, with the simplified interface, one can work fast, through materials.
FineReader can export to different types which is also a great function.
Convert document formats and make them searchable, from scanned documents, screenshots or images to pdfs and html.
It is very good for creating new documents from multiple files, which can be imported in one project then exported to a new file.

Inconvénients: The price is fairly high for those who don't have many documents.
It crashes sometimes while scanning documents with older scanners or when given more demanding tasks, like automatic scan of multiple pages.
If the scan is lower quality, or font is small, there are some mistakes that need to be fixed manualy, which can be time consuming.

Avantages: ABBYY FineReader is a leader in OCR software and that means that their OCR is the best. It can perform character recognition in any language. I am amazed by all the functions that this piece of software has but one thing is so cool and I use it almost every day to help me organize papers in my office. That is "Hot Folder" - every time you add some document into the desired folder it automatically converts it for you into any type of document you want. It can be editable PDF, Word or any other combination you would ever want. It can do it!
Text is recognized very well and without any errors almost every time.

Inconvénients: Sometimes it is struggling with some special letters from foreign languages like Cyrillic or some letters like čćšđž and many times I found that those are recognized wrong. Also, it tends to keep layout and formatting as the original document but sometimes it doesn't work well. Also, when you are trying to manually select area for the recognition it can be very hard and tiring to do all that manually because the software didn't recognize page properly. Most of the times that is not needed but when you are shooting or scanning in lower resolutions be prepared for that.

Commentaires: I use Abby for a number of purposes, however where it is most useful to me is to convert financial data for analysis in Microsoft Excel for further analysis.

Avantages: One of the most useful aspects of Abbyy Finereader, especially when compared to other OCR software is the level of control offered to the user. This enables poor quality scans as an example to be cleaned up and optimized for recognition. It is easy to edit pages collectively or individually to compensate for distortions and even deal with water marks and poor quality images. The accuracy is phenomenal and ability to use dictionaries or customize your own increases recognition capacity. Abbyy Fine Reader has greatly improved over the years and i expect great things from them in the future as technology evolves.

Inconvénients: I do have a wish list: A setting to have ability to ignore pages during recognition.
The ability to ignore a column within a table.
A way to verify text in a chosen sequence such as down then up and or select areas to ignore.

Commentaires: Powerful OCR software for both PC and Mac! Works offline, and can do the job in batches hassle-free.

Avantages: I've been using Abbyy Finereader for about a decade now (since I stumbled upon it with a friend who digitized a lot of his readings). Abbyy is a powerful OCR software! I say powerful, because it captures nearly everything you throw at it, JPG, PDF... and if you're lucky, even handwritten notes are captures (often as image, but sometimes as text too!). It allows to import directly to Microsoft word for text editing. It even mimics the original scanned document in terms of the page layout and text sizes. Very useful for digitizing your existing documents (which you do not have a digital copy of). Heck, you can even scan and OCR an entire book! (copyrights apply, of course). Another good thing for me.... I can use if offline! Modern OCR apps require you to go online (which I cannot always be given the nature of my work and travels).

Inconvénients: Now there are many other alternatives to using ABBYY as an OCR software, and most come as a free service (e.g., Google, Dropbox). It is even made easier now due to the proliferation of mobile phones. Scan a document via mobile phone, then use the online services for OCR, all for free now.