The Scanbot document-scanning app launched this week to positive reviews. Developed by tech company Doo, the app allows users to take high-quality images of documents direct from their smartphones, making it easier to capture digital records of items such as receipts, whiteboard meeting notes and other documents. The app is now available for iOS, with an Android version soon to follow.
What Makes the App Different?
Scanbot is not the first player in the smartphone document-scanning field, with Scanner Pro being one of the more well-known apps to offer this functionality. Scanbot does have some interesting features that set it apart from its peers, however, including the ability to auto-upload scanned documents in the form of JPEG or PDF files to cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, and OneDrive, among others. According to LifeHacker, the image quality of the Scanbot document-scanning app is what really sets it apart, with images touting up to 200 dpi, even when the camera is held at a distance. This gives much better results than simply taking a photo with the phone’s camera.
Other features of the app include the ability to highlight specific pieces of text such as prices, names, or dates. Users also have the option of adding digital signatures to documents before sending them, or syncing them with their preferred cloud storage provider. Furthermore, the app offers text-sharpening, blur correction, auto-edge detection (even if the document has dog-eared or rounded edges), and optimization for color, black and white, or gray scale images. The app automatically focuses to capture the best image of a document, taking the picture without requiring users to press a button. According to 9to5Mac, the Scanbot document-scanning app will also collate multi-page documents into a single PDF file, and users have the option of importing images from their camera roll to sync with their preferred online storage provider.
Scanbot Originally Intended for Inclusion With Another App
While Scanbot has been unveiled as a stand-alone app, Doo CEO Frank Thelen told 9to5Mac that it was originally intended for inclusion in Doo’s first app — also called Doo — a document-syncing application that has since been withdrawn from sale. The app was taken down, according to Thelen, because the uptake of digital documents was slower than anticipated when the company first launched. “We underestimated how long it will take until users switch to digital invoice, receipts, contracts and so on. We know all of these [documents] will be digital and people need something like [the Doo app] when they change their habits, but we couldn’t just wait until this day,” he said. Instead, Thelen is using Scanbot to help initiate the shift to digital documentation by offering users a way to create high-quality digital scans.
Do you think Scanbot and other applications like it will lead the way towards the full adoption of digital documents?
Image courtesy of Flickr
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