With apologies, we get just as frustrated writing about “one day real soon now” prototypes as you do reading about them, so we’re delighted to announce that the long-awaited KNFB Reader app for the iPhone has just been released.
KNFB, developed in a partnership between Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation of the Blind, is an uncannily accurate text-to-speech translator, which uses a cell phone’s built-in camera to perform optical character recognition. For examples, see this side-by-side comparison of an earlier version of KNFB, not yet available for iPhones, to the iPhone friendly Pizmo reader. The KNFB readings are virtually error free, while the competing responses are often sadly gibberish.
Equipped with the KNFB app, an iPhone can be aimed at anything from a menu to a street sign and give an accurate reading. It even lets users know that it’s incorrectly positioned over a piece of text or that an “unidentified printed object” that came in the mail has no text on the side the phone’s being held over.
Here are the features in detail:
• Fast, accurate, and efficient mobile text recognition that delivers near instantaneous results.
• Reading modes for books, articles and labels, bills and memos.
• Synchronized text highlighting with high quality speech and Braille output.
• Field of view report to assist with aligning the camera relative to the document.
• Tilt guidance feature to assist with capturing the perfect picture of a document.
• Automatic text detection to enable hands-free operation.
• Ability to import, OCR, and read image-based pdf and jpg files
• Export txt and html formatted text files to cloud storage services including Dropbox and Google Drive.
• Batch scan mode to process and read multiple pages.
• Recognize and read text in multiple languages; please visit our website for details.
• Additional features including language translation, text editing, and more coming soon.
Nevertheless, such perfection does not come cheap. The app is priced at $99.99 through iTunes and currently requires users to have a model no older than an iPhone 5 running iOS7 or higher.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS-i9rn9nao]
