As a point of reference, it is 1,000 times smaller than the original Kurzweil Reading Machine, and its processor is 2,000 times faster. The Reader weighs 15 ounces and measures 6 inches long by 3 inches wide by 2.5 inches deep. The design team also collected all the images that the Reader Pioneers captured and the resulting documents, so they could be analyzed for the Reader's future development.
What is more important, key members of the design team were also part of the discussion group, so they received immediate feedback that could be incorporated into the current and future versions of the Reader. The Reader Pioneers were all connected via an extremely active electronic discussion group, so users' tips and techniques were readily available. I was fortunate to be one of the beta-testers, which provided a great resource for this article. As many as 500 NFB members participated as so-called Reader Pioneers in an extensive beta-testing process, providing invaluable input to the engineers as they refined the product. NFB also provided its greatest resource: its membership. In addition to providing considerable financial backing for the venture, NFB was deeply involved in the design of the user interface and in managing the project. In 1999, Kurzweil received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. In addition to inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine, he is also credited with inventing the first text-to-speech synthesizer the first music synthesizer that is capable of re-creating orchestral instruments and the first commercially marketed, large-vocabulary speech-recognition engine. Kurzweil brought his obvious technological expertise and history of accomplishment in the technological world. The Reader is the result of a collaboration between NFB and Kurzweil, each of whom contributed their own unique strengths to the development process.
(Our latest evaluations of these leading software products, the Kurzweil 1000 from Kurzweil Educational Systems and OpenBook from Freedom Scientific, appeared in the July 2006 issue of AccessWorld.) The Reader takes this evolution one step further by putting the technology into a portable device that can be taken anywhere. It now runs on PCs that are equipped with inexpensive off-the-shelf scanners, and the leading consumer OCR software products for people who are blind cost just under $1,000.
Over the three decades since the release of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, OCR technology has evolved considerably. Priced at $50,000, its cost was out of the reach of individual consumers. The original machine was a large stand-alone unit that has been described as being the size of a small washing machine. In 1975, Kurzweil (who was interviewed in the September 2004 issue of AccessWorld) unveiled the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which was the first multifont OCR system that was capable of converting printed text to synthetic speech. Before presenting the results, though, I will briefly discuss the collaboration between renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil and the NFB to bring the Reader to market. This article presents the results of our evaluation of the device at the AFB TECH product evaluation laboratory. This innovative new technological device combines a digital camera and a personal digital assistant (PDA) to capture the image of printed text and translate it into synthetic speech. The world's first handheld optical character recognition (OCR) reading system, the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Reader (hereafter, the Reader), was released to the public on July 1, 2006.