I dont have time for a detailed review now but I definitely wanted to update my old rating to reflect the fact that this program has gotten dramatically better over the last couple years.
While I wish it had automatic document selection from an image, at least optionally, it does a much, much better job of recognition than it did early on.
With a good image of clean text, I would even say it is fairly reliable. The difference from the old versions is night and day.
Nice program. Recommended now. Good job, AABBY!
Old review from late 2011:
I must join the chorus of low reviews, sadly. This is only a good program if youre looking for a few words here and there from the text that you photograph--if youre thinking this is like a document scanner for your phone, think again--think very, very hard. My ScanSnap S1500 with Abbyy Finereader gets nearly 100% recognition--this software using the iPhone camera--how shall I put it positively--does much, much better than chance, generally.
If 60% or 70% recognition is okay for you, then this will be a great program. Or if you can set things up like a photo studio, with perfect lighting, angles, and simple, clean text and fonts, the recognition can be higher.
BUT IF YOU NEED ACCURACY ON THE GO, FORGET IT. It would be much faster to take a photo, store it in Evernote or the camera roll, and then transcribe the text manually later, at your convenience. In my limited trials, on things like receipts, and trying to be very still and careful taking pictures with my iPhone 4S, the results have been almost worthless: useful if one wants some of the text and dont mind tons of errors, useless if one wanted to textually capture the actual document.
I will be happy to re-rate the product later if updates work better--theres a real need for something like this, and I realize it is a difficult task.
Labyrintho about TextGrabber scan and translate