IRIS demoed their newest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) products at this week’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio, TX.
The IRISPen II is the first USB pen scanner to be used like a highlighter to allow capture of text and figures in any Mac and Window application at the stroke of a hand. The pen scanner is available in a US$129.99 Standard version, which reads text and figures, and the $199.99 Executive version, which reads text, figures, hand printed numbers, barcodes and includes a text-to-speech module. Either version of the IRISPen helps students organize information, refrain from highlighting in textbooks and hear the text read aloud, company spokesperson Wendy Behn told MacCentral.
Readiris Pro 7 is an OCR package that recognizes digital documents from scans and digital cameras and converts them into editable formats such as Word, Excel and HTML documents. Readiris Pro also recognizes up to 93 different languages. It’s targeted to users in banks, schools, newspapers and “anyone who hasn’t the time to retype pages of text, but needs to edit them,” according to Jean-Marc Fontaine, IRIS’s North American director.
Readiris Pro 7 requires a Power Mac G3 or higher with Mac OS 9.x or Mac OS X, 60MB of free hard disk space, and 32MB of free RAM, and QuickTime 4.0 or better. Options include business card software and a business card scanner add-on. Readiris Pro 7 costs US$99 for the standard edition. There’s also a business edition available at a higher price.