Handheld Device Reads Printed Words to the Blind

geekotourist writes "3,000 people in Dallas this week for the National Federation of the Blind convention are getting a demonstration of what life is like when you can read printed menus, mail, business cards and memos," reports the Dallas Morning News. The NFB spent two million dollars developing the $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, which weighs 15 ounces and combines text-to-speech with sophisticated OCR. The device 'gives the user an initial "situation report," describing what it can see. The user then makes a decision about whether to take a picture. After a few seconds to process the image, the contents of the document are read aloud.' Beta testers describe the joys of reading receipts, CDs, food labels, bulletin boards, conference printouts, or of simply reading books with privacy, without another person's help."

Re:why not braile output?

[alphakappa]

A device that would produce braille output on a surface would be much more expensive than one that had to simply convert words to spoken voice (using one of the many excellent text-to-speech technologies available today). Also, where's the lack of privacy when you are using headphones :-)

Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy

[FleaPlus]

It's probably be noted that the inventor/developer discussed in the article is Raymond Kurzweil [wikipedia.org], who's recently gotten a lot of press for his book about the technological singularity [wikipedia.org]. Here's a brief blurb from the Wikipedia article about Kurzweil's inventions:

Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system.

Re:why not braile output? non-braile readers 'yet'

[callingalloldhippies]

As one who is sporadically losing her sight, I would find this very helpful, but do not, as of yet know braille, nor in the middle of medical procedures which may or may not improve the issue in the possible near future, have the time, energy or immediate need to add one more semi-difficult skill to the list of "Help! I'm overwhelmed".

BUT BOY! It would be a handy addition for the research I need right now.

Re:Inventor is Raymond Kurzweil, Singularity guy

[geekotourist]

And the K-NFB reader could count as a demonstration of what Kurzweil means when he talks about the Law of Accelerating Returns [wikipedia.org]. Looking at the beta tester article [nfb.org]:

The 1975 reader cost $50,000 (over $150,000 in today's dollars) and was the size of a dishwasher. This new reader "is about a thousand times smaller than the original Kurzweil Reading Machine, the PDA in the portable Reader is two thousand times faster. In fact, the portable Reader can execute about 500 million instructions per second as compared to 250,000 instructions per second for the Kurzweil Reading Machine. It also has a thousand times more memory (64 megabytes as compared to 64 kilobytes)."

Re:Didn't we have these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you have. I was in one of the news pieces that aired in Chicago where we presented the "original" technology called the iCare Reader [google.com] (Link to video) [cbs2chicago.com] This is a technology that was invented at Arizona State University a LONG time before Kurzwile ever dreamed about it. The research center called CUbiC [asu.edu] has been working on developing devices for the blind since 2003. I personally helped develop the software for this and I can say we did it for a LOT LOT Less than 2 million.

Oh and not only that, we took 6 months to develop a product and deploy it to a few locations around Arizona.

This is just an example of the big corporation copying an idea and having the resources to mass produce it. We tried to get some disability companies involved in this but unfortunately they all fell through (I believe the original sale price after all the figures were crunched were around $1500 and it included an 8MP camera too).

Its sad but technology in the market these days for individuals who are blind are VASTLY overpriced. This is because most of this is subsidized by the government so they charge extra knowing that it will be covered by some organization with ties to the government. Not only does this stifle competition but it stifles creativity since the big companies have the the capital to market anything they want and since they have a virtual monopoly on this industry, they can charge whatever they like.

That said, I'd like to welcome our new blind overlords and remind them that I can be useful in rounding up some slaves.

Re:why not braille* output?

[sarahemm]

It sounds simpler than it is. Braille cell displays are extremely expensive today, unfortunately. an example of braille cell display pricing [dancingdots.com]