Kurzweil

Blind and illiterate users can outsource reading and translation with Kurzweil's kReader

By Loz Blain

00:57 January 29, 2009 PST

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most amazing intellectuals and inventors of our time. From his teenage years he's been building a long list of extraordinary achievements, from his early work teaching computers to compose music, to his world-first font-independent optical character recognition system, to his pioneering electric synthesizers that are so accurate that even musicians can't discern them from a real piano in listening tests. In 1976, blind music legend Stevie Wonder bought the first production model of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a tabletop-sized device that was able to scan text documents and read them out using a text-to-speech engine. Last year, Kurzweil teamed up with Nokia to integrate the reading machine and its synthetic voice into the N82 mobile phone, letting blind or illiterate users read documents, menus, bills, and anything else they could capture on the phone's inbuilt camera. Now, Kurzweil has announced that the kReader phone can translate text it captures that's in another language and read it out to you in your language. It also has new text-tracking abilities to make it even easier to capture all the text on a page. Read More

The Talking Camera - new handheld electronic reader will change the lives of millions

By Mike Hanlon

June 27, 2006 There are 174 million visually impaired people in the world, and we can hardly imagine how overjoyed these people will be to hear of a groundbreaking new device that has been announced by the United States National Federation of the Blind (NFB) - the Kurzweil-NFB Reader. The handheld machine was developed by NFB and renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil, and enables users to take pictures of and read most printed materials. Users hold the device over any print document (such as a letter, bill, restaurant menu, airline ticket, business card, or office memo) and in seconds they hear the contents of the printed document read to them in a clear synthetic voice. Readers go on sale July 1 for US$3,495. Download a brochure here. The invention will once again focus public attention on the inventive mind of Ray Kurzweil which has made significant contributions to human knowledge in the areas of optical character recognition, music synthesis, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence – read about his remarkable career inside. Read More