Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Business Card Transcription and Human Card Scanning Service

Our office recently needed to capture contact information from several hundred business cards. We ended up spending a very long time correcting the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) results.

It is not entirely the CardScan software's fault. Many business cards are fashion statements. Complicated company logos with cursive fonts, white text on graphical backgrounds, and handwritten notes tend to confuse even the most advanced OCR software.

So we found that the fastest, most accurate method is to have a human manually type the information into an Excel spreadsheet.

Ideally, we could scan the business cards and then transfer the digital image files over the internet. A medical transcription-like company could process each card and return a simple spreadsheet of contacts. Can you think of a better way to do this?

Does a specialized company exist yet to perform this task?

 
Comments:
I've heard of human transcribing services in India - mostly for intense legal cases. Notes are faxed and/or overnighted, and fully typed and integrated by morning.
 

Mechanical Turk from Amazon. http://requester.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
 

check out scanR.com. it is not mechanical but i have been working with them and the business card functionality works pretty well. just use your digital camera, send it in and you get back a relatively accurate vcard. let me konw if you try it.
 

Check the business card scanner in this site: http://www.scanshell-store.com . Their OCR is very good
 

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