Adobe Scan can now automatically turn business cards into phone contacts

Artificial intelligence could soon make manually typing up information off a business card a thing of the past. Adobe Scan, the smartphone scanning app, can now recognize business cards and automatically import them into the contacts on a smartphone. Adobe announced the AI-focused update to Adobe Scan on June 19, which also brings new PDF creation tools into Microsoft Office 365.

Adobe Scan uses Sensei to import contacts

After taking a photo of a business card with Adobe Scan’s built-in camera, Adobe’s Sensei A.I. automatically corrects for shadows and perspective distortion. Adobe says the app can even recognize and crop out a finger holding onto one edge.

With the image converted into something that looks more like it came from an actual scanner, Adobe Scan moves to the next step of text recognition. Sensei is smart enough to tell a business card apart from other documents and when a business card is detected, the app adds a “save to contacts” button. Tapping that option will send the information, including name, phone number, company name, and email address, into a new contact on the user’s smartphone. 

The 1-year-old app already boasts 10 million downloads, and business card recognition is simply the latest in a series of a new A.I.-based features that Adobe has introduced to Scan recently.

Microsoft 365 gains new PDF tools

Coming in the month of the 25th anniversary of Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office users will notice a new ribbon inside the software family following an update to Adobe Document Cloud. That new shortcut adds Adobe Acrobat original PDF tools. Users can now use the Adobe PDF option in the top menu ribbon to create a PDF, including the option to add an e-signature.

The ongoing Microsoft and Adobe partnership also brings options to create and edit PDFs inside SharePoint and OneDrive. The reverse is also true for both programs — PDFs can be converted into Word, Excel, PowerPoint or .rft files from SharePoint and OneDrive.

Toady’s announcements also include updates to Adobe Sign for business, including a new user interface with the tool inside Microsoft Dynamics. Adobe Sign also sees updates to help companies comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is now authorized by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program as an e-sign tool.