Business Card reading Software/Hardware?

Question

So im looking for either a hardware or software solution for a business card reader, which needs to integrate into some custom software. I've done a bit of research and it seems like it comes down to:

1. Hardware Scanner: Can export to CSV/Excel and maybe have an upload function scrape from that into our Application (Any suggestions? I've seen some readers with the Abbyy SDK I believe)

2. Cloud Service: This doesn't seem like a great idea personally, but it's there. (People actually "reading" the cards).

3. Software Solution: Using an SDK or API. I'd like one with some sort of OCR API that is pretty accurate and I can receive maybe either a CSV back or JSON or something similar. I've seen ABBYY has their own API which works with a lot of programming languages, but im open to suggestions! (Ruby/Javascript is ideal as far as languages since this is a Web Application)

The software solution is preferred...but since they are business cards we would still need to scan them so...Also most of the API solutions appear to be cloud solutions (it'd be nice if there was something that wouldn't "go down" with a loss of internet).

Answer 1

The company I work for has a new (as of 2019) Business Card Recognition module as part of our LEADTOOLS Recognition Imaging Toolkit. It consists of unstructured forms components to automatically read and collect information from business cards.

There is an option to use the Business Card Web API as part of the LEADTOOLS Cloud Services, but that’s not the only choice. LEADTOOLS has native business card recognition binaries available for .NET, C, iOS, and Android development.
The toolkit also contains different image capturing features if you don’t already have that covered in your application. For examples, there’s support for Twain and WIA scanning if you’re going to use scanners, and a new Xamarin Camera Control if you want to capture the cards using the camera of a device.

If you would like to try it, there’s a fully-functioning (time-limited) evaluation here. The evaluation has complete demo projects for various platforms, and includes free email and online chat support.