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Today we are launching a new version of Scanner Pro that serves as a very important milestone in the evolution of the product. This 8th generation of Scanner Pro represents the latest step in our product journey and it updates the app with a fresh new look, enhanced user experience, and deeply integrated multi-language on-device text recognition:
- Supplementing Scanner Pro’s best-in-class image processing we’ve redesigned the entire experience to make the scanning and organising of documents simpler and faster
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enabling documents in 26 languages to be scanned and converted into text, which can be quickly and easily read, copied, and shared directly from the app
- Ability to find scans using words and phrases contained within them and to search within a document by applying text recognition automatically to anything Scanner Pro users scan
At the same time, this marks the first step in an exciting new chapter for Scanner Pro and its users. In the last few years, we’ve focused our attention on other products in our portfolio (Spark, PDF Expert, and Documents), changing the way millions of people experience email, PDFs, and file management on their mobile devices. Twelve months ago we decided it was time to return to Scanner Pro and apply the knowledge and experience we’ve acquired building other products to take it and the entire document scanning category to a new level.
We’ve invested heavily into exploring how recent advancements in AI and machine learning, as well as new APIs and services from the likes of Google and Microsoft, can be harnessed within Scanner Pro to help make life easier for the people who use it. The first fruit of this work is already live in the form of a new shadow removal algorithm. But that’s just the beginning — improved border detection, automatic document categorization, and tagging are just around the corner, while new neural network-based OCR for Latin languages is being rolled out today.
Cutting edge technology is just one part of the equation though. Even more important is to apply it in a way that actually improves people's lives. Scanner Pro customers scan receipts, IDs, business cards, and agreements; prepare expense reports; sign contracts; collect digital copies of all their important paperwork. We are committed to using our deep expertise and knowledge of product design to elevate all of these experiences to a new level in the coming months and years.
To support this journey, Scanner Pro is today becoming a freemium product. Which means it becomes a free product with an optional premium upgrade:
Scanner Pro free users will enjoy:
- Best-in-class quality document scanning
- Ability to freely share documents (albeit with a Scanner Pro watermark)
- Sync between devices with iCloud
‘Scanner Pro Plus’ premium subscription adds:
- Watermark free scans
- On-device OCR in 26 languages
- Full-text search both in Scanner Pro and in shared PDFs
- Password protection for both the app and any shared PDF
- Automatic upload to cloud and workflows
‘Scanner Pro Plus’ is competitively priced at $19.99 a year to new customers and is offered with a 7-day free trial that can be canceled at any time.
For anyone who’s previously bought Scanner Pro, access to the current set of ‘Scanner Pro Plus’ features will be free, forever. However, some of the new capabilities that we are going to add in the future might require a subscription.
We hope you enjoy the new version of Scanner Pro. We have much more coming in 2021!
Yours faithfully,
Alex Tyagulsky
Chief Product Officer & Co-founder, Readdle
