ABBYY’s OCR Helps Power Vivino, the World’s Most Popular Wine App
ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies, today announced that Vivino, maker of the world’s most downloaded mobile wine app*, has successfully incorporated ABBYY’s optical character recognition (OCR) technology into their product in order to extract information from wine lists in restaurants. When ordering wine, customers can use the Vivino app to take a photo of a wine offering, and instantly see useful information to help them choose the right bottle. The integrated ABBYY OCR technology extracts the text from the photograph, which is used to access Vivino’s database of ratings and tasting notes from 12 million users, the world’s largest wine library.*
"There's a problem in wine: More than 75% of wines are never rated by experts, leaving wine drinkers with little information about most of the wines they are considering drinking. This is where Vivino’s crowdsourced ratings, supplied by millions of users, become useful as we have ratings for almost every wine in the world" says Torben Mottes, vice president of product management, Vivino. "What’s more, along with details like wine varieties, ratings, and user reviews, we've recently added a list of online merchants to the wine pages in our app, so you can easily buy that new wine you just enjoyed in the restaurant."
With its broad set of tools, ABBYY offers developers like Vivino the ability to integrate high accuracy optical text recognition into their applications. ABBYY recognition technology transforms images of text into searchable and editable formats for checking against a database. In addition to OCR technology, the toolkit delivers intelligent character recognition (ICR), barcode; checkmark and field-level/zonal recognition; and PDF conversion. With accurate ABBYY OCR technology, developers can extend the functionality of a wide variety of applications on different platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Cloud. ABBYY provides the technology, professional services and technical support necessary to create world-class applications – while also ensuring efficient implementation, smooth upgrades and high levels of customer satisfaction.
"We asked the developer community for recommendations on best-of-breed OCR technologies and ABBYY’s name was consistently mentioned. After evaluating a number of different vendors, we chose ABBYY for the conversion speed and recognition accuracy of their OCR," says Mottes. "Although speed and quality of recognition were our main criteria, ABBYY’s performance on text photographed in low light situations was what ultimately helped us decide. Our app users are often in low light settings, such as a restaurant or wine shop, and reliable, consistent text recognition is critical to the app’s performance."
To learn more about incorporating ABBYY technologies and toolkits into your products or services, please visit: www.abbyy.com/ocr-sdk/
* based on Vivino’s company data
About ABBYY
ABBYY UK is a member of the ABBYY Group and supports sales and marketing activities in Western Europe. ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services. Its products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, and development tools. ABBYY offers Professional Services to help customers implementing business solutions based on ABBYY’s products. Paper-intensive organisations from all over the world use ABBYY solutions to automate time- and labour-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. ABBYY products are used in large-scale government projects such as those of Australian Taxation Office, Lithuanian Tax Inspectorate, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, Montgomery County Government of the USA and the Government of Canada. Companies that license ABBYY technologies include BancTec, Canon, EMC/Captiva, Hewlett-Packard, KnowledgeLake, Microsoft, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Samsung Electronics and more. ABBYY OCR applications are shipped with equipment from the world’s top manufacturers such as Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji Xerox, Microtek, Panasonic, PFU, Plustek, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is an international company with offices in Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Ukraine, Cyprus, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. For more information, visit www.ABBYY.com
ABBYY, the ABBYY Logo, FineReader, ADRT, FlexiCapture, and FlexiLayout are either registered trademarks or trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby recognised.
For more information, please contact:
ABBYY Europe GmbH
Elsenheimerstrasse 49
80687 Munich, Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 89 69 33 33 - 0
E-Mail: press_eu@abbyy.com
Web: www.ABBYY.com
About Vivino
Founded in Copenhagen in 2010, Vivino offers everyday wine consumers a way to track, discover and share their wine experiences via the Vivino App. But Vivino is not just another wine app. It is the fastest and easiest way for consumers to access the wines of the world by connecting consumers and wineries globally. 11.5 million people are already Vivino'ing it - changing the way we wine.
For more information visit www.vivino.com