Adobe Scan App's Latest AI Feature Converts Business Cards into Phone Contacts

[MacRumors]

Adobe Scan, Adobe's document scanning app, was updated today with a new feature that lets users capture business cards and convert them into phone contacts.

AI enhancements courtesy of Adobe's Sensei machine learning platform enable the app to recognize a business card when placed in view of the phone's built-in camera. Once the card is recognized, the app presents a "Save Contact" button to the user.

Tapping the new option captures the information on the business card including the name, company, phone number, email address, and any image, and automatically imports it into the user's contacts.

Adobe's Sensei AI also gets to work on the original scan of the business card, automatically correcting for shadows, perspective distortion, and even cropping out any fingers holding the card in the captured image.

Along with the AI-focused update to Adobe Scan, Adobe also announced some new PDF creation tools today for Microsoft Office 365.

New shortcuts in the ribbon of Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint web apps let users convert documents into PDFs (and vice versa) with optional password protection. Likewise, Adobe PDF archiving, conversion, and distribution tools are also now available from within OneDrive and SharePoint.

Adobe Scan can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Article Link: Adobe Scan App's Latest AI Feature Converts Business Cards into Phone Contacts

 

[markiv810]

Tried downloading it, getting payment error "Payment not Completed". Anyone else having same issues.

 

[Chester Stone]

Adobe sucks ⚽️. Don’t download any of their trash. Anti-user subscription model + app proliferation = bad customer experience!

 

[UnfathomableCabbage]

Isn't this part of Evernote's one billion features anyway?

 

[TiggrToo]

Isn't this part of Evernote's one billion features anyway?

Evernote, an app with a great future behind it...

Personally I've used the ABBYY (never grasped that name) business card scanner for ages now. It's not perfect, but it does the job for me.

 

[makitango]

It‘s interesting how words lose meaning over time. Back in the day, intelligent meant that someone or something is aware of themselves, like birds who recognize themselves in the mirror by eating a fruit which sticked to their body without being able to see it.
That same function was present in apps or programs years ago when AI wasn‘t even coined so badly.

 

[zantafio]

So now regular expressions qualify as being "AI" ?

 

[Catherine_mat]

We (ABBYY) have been doing that for years! -> ABBYY Business card reader app for iOS and Android + WatchOS + web client: http://www.abbyybcr.com/en/

 

[kstotlani]

It‘s interesting how words lose meaning over time. Back in the day, intelligent meant that someone or something is aware of themselves, like birds who recognize themselves in the mirror by eating a fruit which sticked to their body without being able to see it.
That same function was present in apps or programs years ago when AI wasn‘t even coined so badly.

I was going to say the exact same thing. Slap the words AI and Machine learning in front of anything now to package old things in a new box. I remember legacy phones not even PDAs used to do this.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Not sure why AI is needed here. I had a phone back in 2005 that could do this by taking a photo of a business card. No AI needed. Countless apps do this now, also without the need for AI.

 

[tothsa]

Text recognition is done by applying machine learning which is ai. Back in 2005 it was still ai.

 

[MacManiac1]

Not sure why AI is needed here. I had a phone back in 2005 that could do this by taking a photo of a business card. No AI needed. Countless apps do this now, also without the need for AI.

The AI part is figuring out what info on the business card goes in what data field of the contact app. It isn’t just a picture, it is putting text into database fields. Hopefully the correct ones.

 

[makitango]

The AI part is figuring out what info on the business card goes in what data field of the contact app. It isn’t just a picture, it is putting text into database fields. Hopefully the correct ones.

You are just describing code using classifiers to calculate just another set of variables. Nothing about it is machine learning because the code cannot improve its assets based upon the rate of success, and nothing is artificial intelligence because it cannot alter or improve its code to solve problems it had encountered before.

This is just going where the marketing boys want this to go, the majority of people eating this language like a happy meal.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

The AI part is figuring out what info on the business card goes in what data field of the contact app. It isn’t just a picture, it is putting text into database fields. Hopefully the correct ones.

Most apps do that already. It's pretty simple to figure out names, addresses, phone numbers, etc, as they're all fairly structured. This may do it slightly better but it seems a bit much to invest in AI for something so simple.

The most likely reality is that anything with AI is hot right now. People will jump at the chance to use anything AI as they feel it offers some wonderful benefit not found elsewhere, even if it's being applied in very basic ways right now.

 

[timborama]

Scans and uploads right into Abobe servers, awaiting future security breaches.