Kurzweil's Revolutionary reading devices for the blind

If you're blind and you have a printed document that contains information you need to read, how do you go about doing that? You might be fortunate enough to have someone around to read it to you - but what if there's no one to ask or perhaps you don't want someone reading your private information...well why not get a computer to read it instead. That's the basic idea behind Kurzweil's Reading Edge.

Q) Why am I stood by the sea to talk about this device?
A) Unfortunately a very elderly relative who cares for another very elderly immobile relative was taken into hospital so I spent the week as a live-in carer for the person left behind. As you can imagine this all happened suddenly, so before driving over to their house at the other side of the country I just had enough time to pack a few clothes and pick up my laptop and a camera. Fortunately I had some footage on the computer that I’d recorded a couple of months prior, so I passed the time while they were napping editing this video together. I shot the to-camera segments at a location a short walk from their house (after making sure they had everything they needed and a phone within reach). I recorded the footage outside as I couldn’t shoot indoors without my usual studio lighting. This video will have a few rough edges here and there, especially when it comes to the sound, but this was the best I could achieve in the circumstances.

LINKS
Andre's demonstration of how quickly he can understand text to speech

Tedium article quoted in the video

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FAQ
Q) Why are there comments from a week ago when this video has just gone live today?
FAQ
Q) Why are there comments from a week ago when this video has just gone live today?

[nmainstream]

I'm totally blind and I had the privilage of owning one of these. It was huge but man it got the job done for sure.

[Charonupthekuiper]

Scan “A Brief History of Time” and give it an authentic sound.

[ironspike]

Mat is a 100% Brit Gentleman and OG: Aplogizes for „unusual video“ while taking care of the elterly. At the same time he lets the device rap to Eminem.... THANK YOU!

[zappawench]

As a secretary that had to use OCR because the boss thought that scanning it and converting it to a word document was a straightforward process, the blind people who relied on this have my sympathy. I often found it quicker and easier to copy type the whole page, rather than go through the mangled text produced by OCR and correcting it.

[laptop]

PCMCIA: People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms

[RNE]

I had the pleasure of talking with Mr. Kurzweil a few years ago after attending one of his talks (The Singularity is Near). His vision of the future prompted me to ask the question, “But don’t you find the future is often disobedient?” To which he replied, “You should trademark that!”

[TheOnjLouis]

Matt, first and foremost, I hope you and your relative are doing as well as can be, given the circumstances. I thank you for a very educational and interesting video.

Being blind myself, Iv’e come across various OCR solutions over the years, but interestingly enough, never this particular one.

These days, OCR can be had in so many different ways, and the most easy one is on my iPhone.
There are free and paid apps that can read a document not only after taking a picture of it and scanning it for review, but in genuine realtime now, so a user can point their phone at a sign, document, or even a live TV with scrolling text on it and have it read out immediately.
It kind of blows my mind how far we’ve come in only what, 44 years or so? A mere blip in history and technology has allowed me to be able to take in printed (or scrolling) text at a glance, just as you yourself do.
Perhaps the accuracy isn’t quite as good when it’s on-the-fly like that, but still crazy.

[joerogers]

My brother and his wife are totally blind. He still uses a program called Jaws on his pc. It has been a great assist. He worked for many years at Kroger's HQ in Cincinnati. a total of over 40 years. He programmed on the IBM 360 and later as PC support.

[MCPicoli]

Your video, even with a "few rough edges" manages to be better than 95% of the content found elsewhere!

[andrewwang]

This intro is incredibly Tom Scott like.

[videocouk]

I'm most impressed with how your microphone was putting up with the wind in Scarborough. The wind shield worked very well indeed.

[CAMintmier]

At the end, I was expecting it to say "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.", then let the magic smoke out...

[cirebyte]

"I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I cant do that"

[Akuzastar]

"I'm beginning to feel like a rap god"

Suddenly I feel the need to buy one of these.

[nosville]

user: asks machine to read a page again
machine: "lmao aeiou"

might be a memory issue

[Vaggumon]

When I was younger I attended the California and Tennessee School for the Blind. We had several of these on hand.

[jamesjross]

This is like Saturday morning cartoons for me. No matter the subject, I just love these. Thanks for the content.

[Maverickr]

I am a computer tech and used to work with a wonderful lady that was almost completely blind. She used the JAWS software on her computer with the reading speed set really fast. After working with and assisting her for so long I actually can still hear and understand what is being said at that speed. It was really neat how you brain can evolve as you work with different things like this.

Great video as always!!!

[MelsvanWees]

Hopefully the people you are taking care off will get better soon! I have a lot of respect for the dedication you have to us the YouTube audience to give us even in times that are tough a wonderful video! It seems that the constraints didn’t hold you back in making a very interesting video. And what a wonderful background! Take care!

[NJRoadfan]

The machine sounds like its going senile in its old age! Still, for the 90s, this was cutting edge tech. Looks like it's SPARC powered. The OCR works much better then I would have expected for software of the time period.

Back when I did computer repair, I occasionally had to repair a system whose user relied on accessibility features. One machine had a screen reader enabled and it was quite impressive how fast the read back rate was set. It's amazing how other senses compensate for the loss of another.