Inventor Builds Mobile Text Reader for the Blind

American inventor Raymond Kurzweil has unveiled a new mobile device (U.S. Patent Publication No. 20050286743) for blind people that reads aloud any printed text. Three decades ago, Mr. Kurzweil invented the first reading machine that converted text to speech. The machine was the size of a washing machine and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Technology has since decreased the size of scanners and increased computing power, but a user still had to take the text to the computer, and not vice versa.

Mr. Kurzweil named the new device the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, ("K-NFB") because of the Federation's involvement in testing and development. The K-NFB is composed of a digital camera and a personal digital assistant ("PDA") running software that interprets text captured by the digital camera and converts it to speech. The major difficulty in building the K-NFB was that images captured by digital cameras frequently suffer from rotation, illumination and other types of distortions. To overcome these distortions, Mr. Kurzweil and his team of researchers spent over three years developing software algorithms to clean up the images. Many of these advancements have been patented, including U.S. Patent Nos. 6,587,583, 6,052,663 and 6,014,464.

A user operates the K-NFB by holding it over the text he wants to read and taking a preliminary snapshot. The K-NFB recites a "situation report" describing what it sees. If the K-NFB sees what the user wants to read, the user then takes a picture of the text. After a few seconds, the text is read aloud to the user. The user listens to the text via headphones, a Bluetooth headset or built-in speakers. Kurzweil Education Systems Inc. began selling the K-NFB on July 1, 2006 for $3,500.