CharacTell Ltd. Announces iREAD Forms™ Advanced Character Recognition™ (ACR) technology is the basis for superior reading of all character types, including unstructured handwriting San Francisco, CA - March 6, 2002 - CharacTell Ltd., a leading provider of advanced and innovative optical character recognition products, today announced iREAD Forms™, the latest in its series of integrated recognition engines. CharacTell has been providing advanced recognition solutions since 1998 based on its revolutionary Advanced Character Recognition™ technology. "With ACR and its unique ability to address nearly all character types," said Arthur Gingrande, one of the most well-known OCR/ICR industry expert, "CharacTell is offering a powerful new solution to an age-old problem: 'how to convert image-based data to useful form fast, accurately and inexpensively?'" iREAD Forms is a sophisticated recognition engine that - in a single pass - can read machine print, hand-print and the challenging non-connected, lower case, hand-writing of alpha and numerals, while routinely achieving recognition rates as high as 97% to nearly 99% with error rates of less than 0.5%. iREAD Forms features two built-in recognition engines, a unique voting mechanism, and an advanced algorithm for utilization of context-based information and dictionaries. iREAD Forms is capable of operating on very low quality characters, training on special fonts and individual hand-writing and is particularly suitable for recognition of critical fields where near 100% accuracy is a must. Advanced Character Recognition (ACR) CharacTell's ACR is based principles of character mapping similar in concept to those used in human gene and DNA mapping. One may think of this mapping approach as a significant technological breakthrough in comparison to traditional feature extraction and neural networks-based products. ACR utilizes a highly accurate set of mapped strings that describe each character uniquely and speedily. The training needed is also much reduced - only a few hundred characters are needed to train on a new font, language or character type - making ACR a powerful tool when data types cannot be fully projected in advance. Availability and Pricing The iREAD Forms engine is offered as a Software Development Kit (SDK) for integrating advanced ICR (handprint) OCR (machine printed) recognition technology into 32-bit Windows applications. JustICR Engine is a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) and a training tool. The Engine API (Application Programming Interface) can be easily used by C/C++, Visual Basic or any other development tools supporting DLL components. iREAD Forms is available immediately. The iREAD Forms SDK is free of charge to first time users. Pricing for run-time licenses depends on projected and actual volume. Contact CharacTell for more information. Company Information CharacTell Ltd was founded in 1998 with the express mission of developing the world's most accurate recognition engines. The company has developed Advanced Character Recognition (ACR) as the strategic technology platform on which it bases its progressive product line. ACR-based products from CharacTell are in extensive use in demanding data entry applications and systems worldwide. CharacTell also markets SoftWriting™ and iREAD Notes™ Pro, two end-user application products dedicated to the conversion of unstructured documents containing non-connected, hand-written notes to editable form. For more information, contact CharacTell Ltd. at (617) 965-1014 or +972-3-648-9484, or visit the CharacTell Ltd. web site at www.charactell.com.