The K-NFB, a joint venture between Kurzweil Technologies and the National Federation of the Blind, has introduced a text-to-speech program for the Nokia N82, explains Engadget.
Coupling Kurzweil’s image processing with the N82’s camera, a user only has to snap a pic of the document to be read. The software will speak it back and allow you to follow along on the handset’s screen as it highlights each word read.
National Public Radio demonstrates how the text on the document will be converted into speech (audio).
The combination Reader and cell phone weighs 4.2 ounces and can store thousands of printed pages with easily obtainable extra memory. Users can transfer files to computers or Braille notetakers in seconds. It is able to read just about all printed materials, from newspapers to glossy printed material and even US currency.
But it won’t be cheap. The NFB device costs $2,100. The software will cost $1,595 and the cell phone is expected to cost about $500, Kurzweil said.
Ray Kurzweil (wikipedia) was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first CCD flat-bed scanner.
At PopTech in 2002 he introduced his alter-ego: Ramona (below) and proclaimed the singularity was near. Ramona is Ray’s photorealistic avatar and host of KurzweilAI.net. Scheduled for release in 2009, The Transcendent Man, documents Kurzweil’s quest to reveal mankind’s ultimate destiny — to be immortalized inside a computer.
Hey! It’s me, Ramona, Raymond Kurzweil’s virtual alter ego.
I’m cuter than he is, I’m smarter, I write and perform my own music
and I’m as real as you!
If futurists Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Hawkins (audio interview) and Cycorp’s Douglas Lenat ever get together on the Semantic Web, they could be dangerous.
Or maybe not.
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