MILPITAS, Calif., Nov. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies and services, today announced the release of FineReader® Touch, an innovative optical character recognition (OCR) application designed specifically for the new touch-centric user interface of Microsoft® Windows® 8. ABBYY FineReader Touch provides text recognition and document conversion via the ABBYY cloud OCR service, enabling users to easily convert scans of documents into text formats such as Microsoft Word, TXT, and more. ABBYY FineReader Touch is available for download at  the Windows Store, and is one of the first OCR applications supporting the new operating system and its newly-designed interface for touch-sensing devices.

With the official release of Windows 8, ABBYY FineReader Touch is compatible with all devices running the new operating system from Microsoft. Users can easily export recognized images of documents to cloud storage systems such as Dropbox®, Evernote®, Google Drive™ and Microsoft SkyDrive™, or store the resulting documents on the local hard drive of their tablet or computer.

ABBYY FineReader Touch is a valuable assistant for business professionals who need to digitize or save their documents in suitable formats, or students and scholars when preparing reports and research papers. Integrated with ABBYY FineReader Online, a cloud-based OCR service, the application supports text recognition in 42 languages including multilingual documents. With its ability to accurately re-create formatting attributes (e.g. headings, bulleted and numbered lists, columns, tables and images) and the layout of documents, it allows users to accurately process a variety of document types.

"Simplicity and user convenience were our main focus when developing this application. As a result, the product is endowed with all advantages of a cloud service. It doesn't take many of computer resources since all major processing takes place on Microsoft Windows Azure®," said Sergey Popov, director of FineReader Products Department at ABBYY.

"We believe that users of Windows devices all over the world will benefit from the new cloud-based OCR application developed by our strategic partner," commented Mikhail Chernomordikov, Evangelism Unit Lead at Microsoft Russia. "The new Windows interface, for which ABBYY FineReader Touch has been specifically developed, ensures easy and convenient work with documents. The Windows Azure platform provides easy access to documents and fast and powerful processing capabilities."

ABBYY FineReader Touch can be downloaded from the Windows Store and installed free of charge. The application offers a "pay as you go" pricing scheme allowing users to save money paying only for the actual number of pages processed. Each registered user receives a bonus of 20 pages for free conversion.

About ABBYY FineReader
ABBYY FineReader is a family of OCR applications for document scanning and conversion. A time-saving alternative to manual retyping, FineReader delivers high quality results in digitizing almost any type of printed document including books, magazine articles, tables, and even faxes.  Based on more than 20 years of development, it has gained worldwide recognition for its exceptional accuracy and received over 150 awards from the industry's leading publishers and testing labs. ABBYY FineReader currently supports up to 189* recognition languages and offers its unique ADRT® technology for the reconstruction of the logical structure of a document across multiple pages. ABBYY FineReader products include the FineReader Professional Edition desktop application, FineReader Corporate Edition for networked environments, the FineReader Online cloud-based service and now the ABBYY FineReader Touch application.** For more information about FineReader, visit http://finereader.abbyy.com.

 ABBYY Partnership with Microsoft
ABBYY has a long history of partnership and collaboration with Microsoft and has been an active member of Microsoft partner programs. The ABBYY FineReader Online service has been named "Best OCR Service" in Microsoft's international contest "Your Business - Your Fame" in 2012. ABBYY also received a Microsoft Partner Award in the category "Windows Azure Russian Partner 2012". Since 2011, new versions of ABBYY's software development kits (SDK) have supported the Microsoft Windows Azure platform bringing new business opportunities to both software developers and their customers and increasing their productivity and cost-effectiveness.

*Amount of recognition languages supported may vary depending on ABBYY FineReader edition.

** The classic interface of Microsoft® Windows® 8 is supported by ABBYY FineReader 11 Professional Edition and FineReader 11 Corporate Edition.

About ABBYY
ABBYY is a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies and services. Its key products include the ABBYY FineReader line of optical character recognition (OCR) applications, ABBYY FlexiCapture line of data capture solutions, ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software, and development tools. ABBYY Language Services provides comprehensive linguistic solutions to corporate customers. Paper-intensive organizations 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 Russia, Ministry of Education of Ukraine, Montgomery County Government of the USA, and 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, Plustek, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Xerox. ABBYY is headquartered in Moscow, Russia, with offices in Germany, the UK, the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Cyprus, Australia, Japan and Taiwan. For more information, visit www.abbyy.com.

© 2012. ABBYY. All rights reserved.

ABBYY, the ABBYY Logo, FineReader, ABBYY FineReader,  ADRT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd. Google and Google Drive are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Google, Inc. Windows, Microsoft, Excel, SkyDrive and Azure are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Evernote is a registered trademark or trademark of Evernote Corporation. Dropbox is a registered trademark or trademark of Dropbox, Inc. Apple and iPhone are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Apple, Inc. in the USA and other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby recognized.

Media Contacts:
ABBYY USA
Derek James
(408) 727-0351
derekjames@mcgrathpower.com

SOURCE ABBYY