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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."
But that's only for n=1 though. For larger values of n (approaching 250) the time comes down to around 7.2 seconds per page.
That's according to the summary. Which might be wrong.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=15&DocumentID=4398#numbers says that 20 million people have significant vision loss. Plus, add in the number of people who are close to blind without contacts or glasses on and the elderly and you can easily see 55 million people.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
From the summary, 30 minutes to scan, 60 minutes to process. Comes to about 22 seconds actually; which, for all intents and purposes, is about 30 seconds.
Actually, this isn't even a thing of the future. I know a blind person who already has an application which does exactly this on his Nokia phone. He can use it to read signs on the street, letters in his mailbox and basically any text he captures with the camera on his phone.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.