Kurzweil's Vision for Aiding the Blind Offers Engineering Inspiration 
From: Electronic Design - 07/20/2006 - page 15
By: Mark David

One of the keys to success as an inventor, says Ray Kurzweil, is figuring out
how to time your inventions - not only with societal trends but also with
emerging technologies that can make your vision a reality. Just look at his
latest creation, the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind portable
text-to-speech reader.  

Market demand was a given, as long as the reader's price and function were
right. In this case, the timing included the prescience to couple
commercially available PDA and digital camera technologies into a single
device that can capture text images and convert them to speech, yet is still
affordable for the average consumer.  

Kurzweil has been working with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) for
more than three decades on text-to-speech conversion devices, starting with
readers the size of washing machines. In 2002, he predicted that affordable
portable reader hardware would be feasible by 2006. Knowing that software
development would probably take close to four years, he and his team of NFB
scientists set to work.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=12980

Photo:
http://www.elecdesign.com/Files/29/12980/Figure_01.jpg

Photo description:
An unidentified person is holding the portable text-to-speech reader in his
right hand. It is a rather thick PDA-sized device. 

Links:
Interview with Ray Kurzweil
http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/ArticleID/12979/12979.html