SHAPE Services, the company behind such popular iPhone apps as IM+ and Business Card Reader, is out with a new application called Smart Scanner. The new app allows iPhone 3GS owners (as they are the only one with an auto-focus camera-equipped iPhone) to interact with the text. Here’s how it works:
- Start the application
- Point your iPhone 3GS’ camera to some text and press the button
- The software does its OCR magic and analyzes text to find phone numbers, emails and/or URLs, and then
- You can either call a number found on the scanned page, send an email or open a web page.
Smart Scanner relies on ABBYY’s OCR engine to do its magic — for the record, ABBYY has its own business card reading app in the AppStore.
Finally, I’ll add that apps like this one and Google Goggles are the future of mobile computing, as they merge online and offline worlds. I love it! 😉
Smart Scanner ($4.99) [iTunes link]