ABBYY

Type	Private
Industry	Computer software Mobile software Applied linguistics Language translation
Founded	1989 in Moscow, Russian Federation
Key people	Chairman: David Yang, CEO: Sergey Andreev
Products	OCR, document conversion, document capture, dictionary software, mobile solutions
Employees	1000 (2011)
Website	www.abbyy.com

ABBYY ( /ˈʌbɪ/) is a Russian software company, headquartered in Moscow, that provides optical character recognition, document capture and language software for both PC and mobile devices.^[1]

History

ABBYY was founded in 1989 by David Yang. As of 2011, the company has over 1000 employees in fourteen offices in Germany (Munich), the UK (Bracknell), the USA (Milpitas, CA), Japan (Tokyo), Taiwan (Taipei), Russia (Moscow), Ukraine (Kiev), Canada (Ontario), Australia (Sydney), and Cyprus.^[2]

The key area of ABBYY's development and research is text recognition technologies and applied linguistics. The majority of ABBYY products, such as document conversion and document capture solutions and technologies, are designed to simplify the transition from paper documents to electronic information, eliminating the most time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks such as retyping text and manual data entry. ABBYY also develops language products, which include ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software and solutions for professional translators such as ABBYY Aligner.^[3]

In 2007, a branch specializing in publishing dictionaries, reference books, encyclopedias and guide-books, ABBYY Press, was established.^[4] ABBYY also owns ABBYY Language Services, a high-tech translation and localization agency.^[5]

Awards

In March 2011 ABBYY was selected for KMWorld 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management Award (for the fifth year in a row).^[6] In May 2006 ABBYY USA was awarded the Fujitsu Quarterly Innovative Leadership Award.^[7]

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.^[8]

Products

FineReader

For converting document images and PDFs into editable and searchable files

FlexiCapture

A dynamic data capture application that automatically processes multiple document types in a single stream

Recognition Server

Server-based software for automating document recognition and PDF conversion processes

PDF Transformer

An application for PDF conversion and creation;

Mobile OCR Engine(SDK)

A powerful software development kit which allows developers of mobile and small footprint applications to integrate highly accurate optical character recognition technologies that convert images and photographs into manageable and searchable text.

Lingvo

A family of electronic dictionaries for PC, PDA and smartphones, as well as print dictionaries. It gives translations of words and phrases for a range of European and Asian languages, accompanied with transcription, pronunciation, word usage examples and the list of inflected forms. It includes Lingvo Tutor — a flash-card utility for memorizing words. In its current iteration, Lingvo x5 is available in English-Russian, 9 languages, and 20 languages.

ABBYY Compreno

In 2011 and 2012 ABBYY announced on various occasions that it is close to presenting a usable version of their new machine translation and text semantic analysis system named ABBYY Compreno. In 2012 several notable Russian IT-News magazines (like PC Week (Russian Edition) - pcweek.ru, CNews, Компьютерра-Online - computerra.ru, 3DNews.ru, IT-Weekly.ru) have published articles with previews of Compreno and its potential applications. As the reviewers claim, the technology may become a breakthrough in the field, which will bring about previously unreachable quality of machine translation and depth of "understanding" of analyzed text by the machine. The technology has supposedly been developed by the company since over 15 years, with the total invested budget of over $50 million USD and hundreds of employees involved on permanent basis. In the beginning of 2011 ABBYY had additionally received a 475 million Russian roubles (about $15 million USD) grant for the development of their Compreno technology from Skolkovo innovation center. The technology is supposedly based on USH (Universal Semantic Hierarchy) and 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 key-word searching. The company declared it's currently in the beta phase of technology development and a number of pilot project applications are being realized. First functional systems for English and Russian are expected to be implemented not earlier than by end of 2012; the semantic hierarchy trees for German, French and other widely-used West-European languages are expected to be ready within a few years.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14]}

As announced by ABBYY, systems based on the Compreno technology will allow to^[15][16]:

• perform intellectual search of information;
• answer questions asked in natural language;
• receive search results in multiple languages for specific queries (asked in one language);
• automatically annotate and produce summaries of documents;
• recognize natural language;
• extract facts and relationships for specific search queries.

A large number of specialists, which is supposed to be required to further develop the world-wide use of Compreno technology in subsequent years, is expected to be dedicatedly trained on the two newly opened chairs of Computational Linguistics, which were established in May 2012, under support of ABBYY and IBM, in the Institute of Linguistics of Russian State University for the Humanities and in the faculty of Innovations and High-Tech of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology^[17][18][19]

Reception

PC Advisor commented, in 2005, "FineReader 8.0 Pro is the best OCR software we've seen"^[20] while PC Magazine gives it four stars out of five.^[21]

However, 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."^[22]

In January 2007 the FineReader Engine (an OCR SDK) was selected for use in Ricoh's DocumentMall document management system.^[23]

References

External links

• Official website
• ABBYY FineReader Online Recognized with KMWorld Trend-Setting Product Award