Live voice reader for the blind

1991/12/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Hardwarea

The reader Xerox-Kurzweil offers the blind the ability to read any text. It has the dimensions of a suitcase and weighs 8.6 kilos. As for the operation, he divides his work into two phases: on the one hand he performs the reading of the characters and on the other the synthesis of the voice.

It is based on Artificial Intelligence for character reading. Character shape, curve direction, character specific characteristics, etc. analyze them without considering their size and style. The reader has his own dictionary to be able to check one by one the words he reads. The equipment has two different versions, one composed of a voice synthesizer and an automatic desktop scaner.

This model can include a set of pages, as the scaner passes them automatically as you read them. The scaner is able to distinguish between text and images and whether the text is continuously organized or in columns. In addition, you can save the text in memory and pass it to a tape or a computer.

This version uses four different voices, including a man, a child and a woman. Read between 120 and 350 words per minute and respect the intonation or melody expressed by punctuation marks.

The second version consists of a voice synthesizer and a manual scaner. Scaner uses a specific “template” to read the pages. “Template” and scaner have magnetic components for the scaner to follow the moving lines.