Wednesday, November 5th, 2008
How the blind can read again using your mobile
Surprising this article (in English) that says Joi Ito's blog:
When Peter Alan Smith pulls out his cell phone in a crowded restaurant in Back Bay, there is nothing to suspect that his Nokia is by far the most expensive phone all over the place. It has about $ 2,400 dollars in software loaded onto the $ 600 computer that's worth.
But then it becomes apparent that
uniqueness of the phone: a flash flashes when you take a photo of the menu, and a few seconds later, the phone has translated the image into text form, and begins to recite the menu through the headset quickly.[...]
"At work I take a picture of two separate documents to tell which is which," says Smith, [...]. At home, if I am preparing chili, I can take the picture of a can to be sure that the beans are before opening.
The KNFB Reader enables you to shoot print and hear out loud
The article explains how this useful technology requires the combination of optical character recognition (OCR), text synthesis and speech recognition. The first equipment developed by its founder, Ray Kurzweil, back in 1976, was as big as a washing machine and cost $ 50,000 (of the time!).
Ray software is included in most OCR programs that come with today's printers and SCANERO, but soon realized that there are many posters in the streets, ATM screens ... thousands of texts that you can bring to the table to scan. So he began work on a portable computer that these tårer hicieste. The first was a PDA attached to a Canon camera, but now there is an integrated model on a Nokia with 5 megapixel camera.
In the U.S. there are 1.3 million blind, and has already sold thousands of units of its invention. But there is such a much larger proportion of dyslexics, who see the words but have problems with connecting and understanding the text, and is preparing a version designed for them.
The applications of this software are endless. They are working on a computer that is able to take a picture to a document in one of seven languages, and translated into English and read it aloud. It is even trying to do with voice. A prototype is already able to record a conversation in one language and then say it in another. And this may be in the street in just three years.
The price of this technology will come down soon, according to become popular. And $ 2,400 dollars is not much in the world of products for the disabled: a PDA that displays the text in Braillie costs $ $ 4,500.
Without doubt, the technology helps many people to minimize the impact of their disabilities, and is something that ends up being useful to the entire population (for example, seek a little about the origins of the now ubiquitous "Web Accessibility").
By: Mark Gonzalez Troyes in General
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