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Intel's New E-Reader For the Visually Impaired
serverguy writes "Intel will be releasing a win for all visually impaired members of society, a new device called the Intel Reader. It allows visually impaired people to take a snapshot of a newspaper, book, or magazine and have it read back to them. It's estimated that in the US alone there are as many as 55 million people who could make use of such a device. It comes at hefty price though: the paperback-sized device costs $1,499. The device contains a 5-megapixel camera and is powered by a Linux OCR system that converts text into spoken words. The device can hold up to 2GB of data, which would equate to around 600 snapshots. In addition to reading text, the device can also play back audio books in a number of supported formats such as MP3 and WAV. The Intel Reader is expected to be released next Tuesday." The device won't be speedy: "Intel says it takes about 30 seconds to process each page of text... It took... about 30 minutes to scan in the pages of a 250-page book and then one hour to process them."
30 seconds ought to be enough for anybody.
The raw features somehow make the $1500 seem odd. The admittedly unwieldy equivalent built out of commodity parts is basically a 5-megapixel camera that transfers its data over USB (can be had for under $100 these days), and a netbook (~$300), for a total of ~$400 of hardware. What's the extra $1100 for? The integration into a nice portable package? Development costs of a proprietary OCR/voicesynth pipeline?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The N900 seems like it ought to have enough horsepower to do this job, perhaps slightly slower but I don't see why the device can't be reading and scanning at the same time. N900 has a 5MP, I'm sure a future iPhone will have an acceptable camera... et cetera. I'm curious if there's audio feedback to tell you if you're correctly framing the page.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you watch the video demonstration in the article, I believe that the device pronounces "reading" as something closer to "ri-add-ing."
It's hard to tell because the demonstrator starts to speak just before the word is read by the device, but I listened to it twice and heard "ri-add-ing" both times.
I see this device somehow being turned into something that pirates audio books, or spies on people.
Now we have yet another device waiting to be demonized by the copyright nazis.
Kid-proof tablet..
This device is a violation, and users will have to pay royalties for a public performance of a copyrighted work.
#1) You are "copying" (aka pirating), when you take the snapshot.
#2) The device then produces an audio public performance of the pirated work.
It's illegal under copyright laws and the DMCA.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Didn't some group sue Amazon over the Kindle's ability to read text out loud? Is Intel next on the hit list due to this? I mean, for $1,500 you could hire some poor, out of work, minstrel to walk around with you and read articles in real time.
Granted, they are a bit clunkier than what most airlines allow for as carry on luggage items, but still.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I thought that the Kindle wasn't able to do text to speech because of copyright concerns. How is this any different?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/amazon-backs-off-text-to-speech-feature-in-kindle/
Maybe someone could build a device that lets you download the text of many national newspapers and can do a test-to-speach from that, instead of trying to use a crappy OCR application. Maybe if the sold it for a lot less, say $300, then it would be more affordable for blind people. They may not get many local newspapers, but for the price difference it might be a better fit for their income. It might be good if they could download the text of many books too. Could we interest a large bookseller, like Amazon, into selling them?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I'm looking forward to someone unlocking the reader SW from its Linux-driven dedicated HW. I'd like my webcam to read my books and magazines to me at home.
--
make install -not war
I did not RTFA, but doesn't 55 million seem like an inflated figure? (Supposedly the number of people in the U.S. who are visually impaired enough to make use of this device) The U.S. has approximately 300 million people. This means more than 1 in 6 people are visually impaired enough to "make use" of the device. Or they're just lazy.
It was too small to see in the article, but I didn't see Braille on the buttons to tell a (True) visually impared person where to touch... Also, If they can't see to read, etc, how can they read the instructions that are on the screen?
The thought is nice, but I don't think well thought out... Kinda like Braille on the ATM in the drive through lane at the bank, WTF?
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
You do realise that there is such a thing as blindness right? And that there are enough of these blind people around to have just about every sign in a business have braille or raised lettering.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This seems like crazy overkill. Benetech's program BookShare already provides the content in a format that traditional disabled accessible devices can handle. Plus it's all free for the content. This is probably the single most socially beneficial exception to the copyright law operating on the books right now. Any disabled person can have access to any copyrighted content at no charge through this program. Totally amazing:
http://www.benetech.org/literacy/bookshare.shtml
Aside from the fact that you're a troll, there's a deeper meme here worth debunking: that accessibility features are just for the "impaired".
Gregg Vanderheiden gave the closing plenary talk at the SIGCHI 2001 conference. The subject was how creative integration of accessibility features can greatly improve functionality for all users, including examples of products originally designed for people with impairments which went on to wider commercial success. As an example of this kind of thinking, with portable devices (mobile phones, music players, PDAs) we're all "blind" at some time or another -- we cannot or do not want to redirect our visual attention to the device. So what happens when the normal function of the device includes cues to operation that don't require vision (via audio, haptics, etc.)? The device becomes more useful to everyone, including those with visual impairment. Likewise, by including design elements that work when users can't hear a device that device is more useful to both the hearing impaired and to users in loud environments.
There's a summary of this presentation with more details here: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/chi/ Scroll down past the stuff about Bill Gates' opening keynote (which was utterly lame in comparison to Vanderheiden's talk, IMO).
Unfortunately rip-off pricing is pretty much guaranteed in accessibility devices. Just go compare Kurzweil 1000 with similar commodity scanning apps.
I'm not too sure about the various degrees of visual impairment that would reduce visual acuity to the point where reading is no longer feasible, but...
On the face of the matter, it seems someone ludicrous, or at the least ironic, that the device relies on a visually impaired individuals using a visual interface to interpret documents they cannot read. If they're impaired such that they cannot read, then will they easily be able to tell that the document is in focus? That the document is even entirely in the frame?
The screen looks awfully small, too...
It seems more like this device would help people who can see, but perhaps are unable to read for various reasons. If the cost were cut down, it may help in countries where there are many illiterate people. It may also be a solution for people with severe dyslexia.
http://www.tenjou.net/
Your post is yet more proof that racism is due to brain damage.
I don't get the big push in text-to-speech technology. Is there a problem with making the fonts bigger?
My Android G1 is killing me and there's absolutely no accessibility feature to enlarge the fonts. The 1.6 update brought an accessibility option in the settings menu -- but the only option available is T2S. ARRRRGH!!!
Screw that, they'll be an iPhone app that does this in about two months that also makes fart noises.
Maybe the big picture is that Intel has not been successful, generally, at making products other than processors and chipsets and motherboards.
Intel had a consumer division which was closed. I don't know the reason for closing the division, but all the Intel consumer products I reviewed had major flaws.
Right now I'm trying to find a graphics driver for an Intel chipset motherboard. The Intel web site is amazingly complicated to use.
Generally, Intel employees say they are unhappy with CEO Otellini. Stories are told of extreme inefficiency in every area besides the main business.
Once I called for Intel technical support, and told the technical support representative about a major problem with the Intel web site. He said, "We are updating it, that will be fixed soon." A year later, I called again about something else. I accidentally got the same Intel representative. When I asked him about the fault on the web site that was still exactly the same, he made exactly the same statement.
At $1500 most people that they supposedly are targeting will not be able to afford it. So other than 'goodwill' this is worthless.
Putting DRM on a device built for the visually impaired? I don't see it.
I'm going to hell.
Blind Person: "Where's that dang little camera thing?"
(feels around until they find it)
Blind Person: "Where's that paper?"
(find the paper and unfolds some pages)
(Takes a picture of the paper upside down)
Reader: "Blah duh mup plump fluget..."
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I have just got a proprietry scanner/ocr solution at work. I am limited in time but did investigate an open source solution for linux. But all i seemed to come accross was that "no OCR touches the commercial stuff". Indeed, some said, it can still be cheaper on a word/accuracy perspective to outsource to a typing service.
What I have done is use the Searchable PDF output and used linux to 1. Produce a gif thumb of the PDF, and 2.) Use pdf2text to put in a db.
The slowness frustrates me, I have much work to do on this.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
According to this article on EETimes :
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221600886
"I filed the first patents on this technology and have been the leader of the design team," said Foss, the "inventor" of this device.
A patent for putting together in such bleeding obvious way two existing technologies like OCR and text to speech ?
It is as laughable as the absurd price. This is more like an iPhone app, hardly an "invention".
What a joke!!
Kurzweil already makes the KNFB reader which runs on a Nokia N82 based phone. The package is about $1500.
http://www.knfbreader.com/products-mobile.php
Just wait until the book publishers get wind of this.
I predict pointless IP lawsuits up the ass :(
Book publishers already claim using a screen reader for the blind is a copyright violation, text-to-voice on ebooks being illegal (I hope Amazon squashes that lawsuit instead of settles), and bypass some form of access control that doesn't exist and thus is a DMCA violation too.
And this is why we can't have nice things
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Surely umpires and referees everywhere will weep tears of gratitude.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Really? They're releasing "a win"? That wording is "a fail". Get lost.
I am happy you published my story, but pissed off that you removed the back link to the original http://bblogic.com/showthread.php?t=733, instead you back linked to some other persons blog WTF?
I still laugh at the for the blind part. Are the blind expected to know what page they're on with which to have read?
"I really wonder what page 47 says".
What exactly makes you laugh about this? If you scan or take a picture of a page and OCR it, that typically includes the page number. If you scan and OCR a whole book, you can ctrl-f for the page number or skip to that page in the document if you have kept the pagination the same. Then you listen to what is on page 47 and no longer wonder. Blind people are perfectly capable of flipping pages to scan and screen readers are pretty good at telling them what is going on. You should check out what they are able to do before you laugh.
There's no iPhone app for this?
Jim Shilliday
Very well put.
Just like those "power chair" commercials you see on TV that say they will get your medicare to pay for it. This device is no different. Massively overpriced and underpowered; trying to cash in on the visually impaired and their insurance.
An Android phone with a scanning attachment (or just a good camera) would have both the processing capability and the memory to extract text from images and run it through a text-to-speech engine.
I'm not anti-Intel, but this is just embarrassing.
- a legally blind software engineer -
The New York Times used Amazon's Cloud computing to create PDF's for a lot of their public domain files. And there's the PGP cracking efforts slashdot mentioned before.
Maybe Intel should tie this into a cloud computing based system that could distribute each scanned page to a new VM for processing. That way the pages could be prepared in parallel and loaded back to the system.
Ideally the result of the scanning process would be uploaded to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Google Books, and digital library efforts around the world, but first things first.
Another option would be to put the pages that are scanned into the ReCaptcha database.
What I'm saying is that it's not at all practical. Blind people can't see the page number without the reader, and the idea is to be able to OCR the book. OCR'ing has it's uses and that in itself can assist the visually impaired, but the device itself is not visually impaired friendly. Also, my uncle is blind, so I actually am quite familiar with how OCR helps him out.
How exactly could it be more practical? Currently to read a book a blind or visually impaired person that can't read needs a sighted person that can assist them or they need to manually scan a whole book or whatever pages they want. A flatbed scanner is usually slower than snapping a picture. This or a cellphone with similar software on it is a portable solution that makes the same thing possible. Yes they have to wait for the OCR process to know what the page number is or they have to OCR the whole book and search, but I'm not sure how that could be much better. This device at least makes going to the library or finding out what is in a given book or on a piece of paper a little easier and faster.
I guess I also can't see how the device itself isn't visually impaired friendly. I haven't used this particular device but the Nokia phones with the similar software announce the process to you and essentially have a screen reader running on them. When you press a button or navigate through the menus, you hear the options, making them rather accessible. If this device is really targeted to blind or the visually impaired it would have the same functionality.