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

Tuesday June 19, 2018 2:00 AM PDT by Tim Hardwick
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]

Tags: Adobe, Office 365
14 comments


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Chester Stone
10 months ago
Adobe sucks ⚽️. Don’t download any of their trash. Anti-user subscription model + app proliferation = bad customer experience!
Rating: 3 Votes
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makitango
10 months ago
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.
Rating: 2 Votes
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timborama
10 months ago
Scans and uploads right into Abobe servers, awaiting future security breaches.
Rating: 2 Votes
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kstotlani
10 months ago

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.
Rating: 2 Votes
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zantafio
10 months ago
So now regular expressions qualify as being "AI" ?
Rating: 2 Votes
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TiggrToo
10 months ago

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.
Rating: 1 Votes
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UnfathomableCabbage
10 months ago
Isn't this part of Evernote's one billion features anyway?
Rating: 1 Votes
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Catherine_mat
10 months ago
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/
Rating: 1 Votes
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makitango
10 months ago

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.
Rating: 1 Votes
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