ABBYY

Type	Private
Industry	Computer software Mobile software Applied linguistics Language translation
Founded	1989 in Moscow, Russian Federation
Key people	Founder: David Yang, CEO: Sergey Andreev[1]
Products	FineReader, FineReader Engine, PDF Transformer, FlexiCapture, FlexiCapture Engine, Recognition Server, Lingvo Dictionary, Business Card Reader, Mobile OCR Engine, Mobile Imaging SDK, FineScanner, Scan Station, TextGrabber+Translator
Number of employees	over 1250 regular and 900 freelance (as of 2013)
Website	www.abbyy.com

ABBYY /ˈʌbɪ/ is an international software company that provides optical character recognition, document capture and language software for both PC and mobile devices.^[2]

The majority of ABBYY products, such as ABBYY FineReader, are intended to simplify converting paper documents to digital data.^[3] ABBYY also provides language-based software products and services.^[4]

History

ABBYY was founded in 1989 by David Yang^[5] and was named BIT Software before 1997. ABBYY has 4 headquarters: North America (Milpitas, California), Western Europe (Munich), Eastern Europe (Kiev) and in Russia (Moscow). Most of the research and development projects are conducted in Moscow. The ABBYY Group comprises 16 global offices located in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, the UAE, the UK, Ukraine and the United States.^[6] In 2007, a branch specializing in publishing dictionaries, reference books, encyclopedias and guide-books, ABBYY Press, was established.^[7] ABBYY also owns ABBYY Language Services, a high-tech translation and localization agency.^[8]

Products

ABBYY's software understands text characters and document formatting attributes in images. ABBYY also develops data and document capture applications, software development kits, linguistic software and other programs.

ABBYY FineReader

The FineReader application converts scanned images into editable file formats and has received an "Excellent" rating by PC Magazine.^[9] The latest version, FineReader 12, recognizes printed text in 190 languages.^[10]

ABBYY FlexiCapture

ABBYY FlexiCapture is a data and document capture system that automatically extracts information from forms and semi-structured documents such as invoices.^[11][12]

ABBYY PDF Transformer

ABBYY PDF Transformer is an application for editing PDF documents, including opening, editing, commenting, converting PDF files, etc.^[13] The latest version is ABBYY PDF Transformer+ released in 2014 and updated in 2015. It supports 189 languages and available for Windows only. PDF Transformer+ is an alternative to Adobe Acrobat.^[14][15] Released versions are:

ABBYY PDF Transformer+ is the latest product version released worldwide on March 25, 2014. It delivers functionality to open, edit, comment, convert PDF files, and extract text and image content from PDFs.^[20]
Supported input formats include: PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, VSD, VSDX, RTF, HTML, BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, JBIG2, PNG, TIFF, and GIF. Supported saving formats are the following: DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, RTF, PDF, PDF/A (2b), HTML, CSV, TXT, ODT, EPUB, and FB2.^[21] With the latest version, ABBYY PDF Transformer has turned from a PDF converter to a PDF editing application.^[22]

ABBYY Compreno

As of 2011 and 2012 ABBYY is working on a usable version of its new machine translation and text semantic analysis technology named ABBYY Compreno.^[23] At the beginning of 2011 ABBYY received a grant of 475 million Russian roubles (about US$15 million at that time) from the Skolkovo innovation center for the development of its Compreno technology. The technology is supposedly based on USH (Universal Semantic Hierarchy). Syntactic Parsing Technology is used to complement the USH.^{[24][25][26][27]} The approach will allow for both the in-depth syntax analysis of the source text and the differentiation of subtle details of meaning based on world- and subject-knowledge. It is prospected to be used for intellectual information search based on abstractly defined content and expressed ideas / involved subjects (regardless of specific terminology and vocabulary used), as opposed to currently widely used keyword searching.^{[28][29][30][31][32][33]}

A large number of specialists to further develop the worldwide use of Compreno technology is expected to be trained via the two newly opened chairs of Computational Linguistics, established in May 2012 with support from ABBYY and IBM, at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities and at the faculty of Innovations and High-Tech of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology^[34][35][36]

ABBYY Business Card Reader

ABBYY Business Card Reader is a mobile software application that imports contact information from business cards directly to mobile address books using a smartphone's camera and text recognition technology. First released in 2009, the application is now available for Symbian, Apple iPhone in January 2010, and Android.^[37] It uses ABBYY's optical character recognition (OCR) technology for mobile devices, which was introduced to the market with ABBYY Mobile OCR Engine.

Currently, the application supports 20 languages, including popular European languages and Korean, and reads both monolingual and multilingual business cards. The software has received positive reviews in Russian PC Magazine^[38] and Macworld Australia.^[39]

ABBYY Lingvo

ABBYY Lingvo Translation Dictionary is an application that gives the user access to multiple bilingual and monolingual dictionaries. A number of different versions are available, which together cover 19 languages (as at June 2015^[40]), but there is not a dictionary for every pair of languages: translation is between English and/or Russian and some or all of the other 17 languages, namely: Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Kazakh, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Tatar, Turkish and Ukrainian. Depending on the version, it contains up to 224 general and specialized dictionaries, including Oxford English dictionaries, with a maximum of over 10,000,000 entries (again depending on the version; both counts correct as at June 2015).^[40]

Reception

PC Advisor commented, in 2005, "FineReader 8.0 Pro is the best OCR software we've seen"^[41] while PC Magazine gives it four stars out of five.^[42]

Also in 2005, PC Pro gave FineReader four stars out of six, saying, "FineReader offers a decent compromise between the value and accuracy of Readiris and the power and automation features of OmniPage. If you need automation on a budget, it's the package to go for, but for home and occasional office use Readiris is the better package at this price."^[43]

In January 2007 the FineReader Engine (an OCR SDK) was selected for use in Ricoh's DocumentMall document management system.^[44]

Awards

In March 2011 ABBYY was selected for KMWorld 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management Award (for the fifth year in a row).^[45] In May 2006 ABBYY USA was awarded the Fujitsu Quarterly Innovative Leadership Award.^[46]

Company name

ABBYY claims that the company name means "keen eye" in the hypothetical reconstructed parent language of Miao–Yao, Nu, Hmong–Mien, Hmong and Kim Mun groups of the Sino-Tibetan language family.^[47]

References

External links

• Official website