Point, Click and Listen To Printed Text With The Intel Reader, Isn’t That Innovative Enough?

Posted by Shahbaaz ||

November 13, 2009 ||

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reading-for-dummies-cartoon When I was doing some reading with Sidney Sheldon’s Doom’s Day Conspiracy, I had this friend of mine, Joe, who was so interested in going through the book, that he said he would not have even have coffee until he was done with that book. Crazy, huh? But he actually didn’t want to read it because prolonged reading often irritated his eyes.

And Intel somehow knows that my friend Joe was not the only one who suffered with this sort of dyslexia or some other reading inability. There are 55 million people in U.S. who can make use of Intel’s innovative text-to-speech reader / ebook reader to fulfill their book reading pleasures. Yes, Intel now has a solution to this problem.

Intel has recently unveiled an innovative ‘ebook reader type’ handheld device which is called Intel Reader. The Intel Reader measures the size of a book and is actually a device that reads out ebooks for its users. Yeah, sort of (check out the video at the end).

The innovative Intel Reader features a special 5MP camera that can effortlessly shoot and save clear shots of texts even from 1m far. You can command the device to read this ‘pictures-of-texts’ aloud on an inbuilt stereo speaker or choose to switch over a headphone.

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Intel Reader : Innovation Has A Name

This device actually comes with a text-to-speech engine that transforms the images of text you have captured into speech, i.e., mp3 audio making it easy for you to listen to the text and make the captured shots and turn itself in to not any less than an audio book reader in no time (see the camera inscribed at the bottom).

The Intel Reader has a 4.3” LCD display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, a Solid State Drive which can store upto 600 processed pages (images and text) or 500,000 text-only pages. (Good Lord! Quite big enough to have a portable library of your own).

It is run by an Intel Atom processor and powered by 3300mAh Li-on battery which lasts for up to four hours of ‘text to speech’ favors. It is all yours for $1499 (Rs. 72,000 approx.) and additional $400 (Rs. 19,200 approx.) for the Portable Capture Station.

Featured : Intel Reader

It also allows you increase the font size on the screen, if the text is not large enough for you to read comfortably. Intel Reader allows us to export the text-to-speech files as an audio file or an ebook book. That one reason why we feel like appreciating Intel, again.

Though manually controls should work fine, Intel has specifically included tactile buttons and voice operated menus for the visually impaired people.

Here is what the wizards from Intel have to say about their device:

Intel Corporation has announced the Intel® Reader, a mobile handheld device designed to increase independence for people who have trouble reading standard print.

The Intel Reader can assist the estimated 55 million people in the U.S. who have dyslexia or other specific learning disabilities, or have vision problems such as low-vision or blindness, which makes reading printed words difficult or impossible.

This Intel ebook reader will be available through select resellers across the U.S. and is indeed a better way to go reading, or actually, listening to ebooks for people who prefer listening to reading and more importantly, millions others like Joe, who are visually, or sort of.

Watch the following video to see Intel Reader in action.