“Breakthrough” Smart Reading tech delivers bespoke assistive reading experience for people with vision impairments
OrCam Technologies, a specialist in artificial vision technology, has announced a new, interactive Smart Reading feature that will integrate with its assistive technology platforms to personalise the assisted reading experience for people with vision impairments.
OrCam’s new voice-activated Smart Reading feature enables users who are blind, visually impaired or have reading challenges, including dyslexia, to tailor the assistive reading experience to their specific areas of interest using intuitive voice commands.
Smart Reading, which combines OrCam’s advanced computer vision and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, operates as a “voice-activated assistant” to make any text – whether in print or digital formats – more accessible to the reader when using OrCam’s original text-to-speech reading engine.
Activated by the user’s voice, the algorithms driving the Smart Reading feature listen to – and comprehend – the user’s requests, retrieving the relevant information and reading the requested text to the user within a few seconds.
“After devoting 10 years of R&D efforts to developing our pioneering OrCam MyEye device, we are proud to now offer the interactive Smart Reading feature, which takes AI-enabled assistive reading to an entirely new level of accessibility for people with visual impairments and those with reading challenges,” said Prof. Amnon Shashua, OrCam Technologies Co-founder and Co-CEO. “We work tirelessly to create sustainable and long-lasting solutions that set the bar on the level of independence artificial vision technology can provide for people whose access to the world may be restricted, opening up new opportunities and enhancing their quality of life.”
To access specific information within a text, the user utilises simple voice commands, such as: “Read [newspaper] headlines,” “Start from vegetarian [menu items],” or “Read amounts [of a bill].”
Retrieving only the requested information, Smart Reading becomes the “brain” that powers OrCam’s text-to-speech engine, serving as a voice-activated assistant that understands and responds to what the user wants to know.
See Smart Reading in action below:
The Smart Reading feature can be integrated with both the OrCam MyEye as well as the OrCam Read devices.
The voice-activated, wearable OrCam MyEye device, for people who are blind or have low vision, instantly reads any printed text and digital screens out loud, recognises faces, and identifies products/bar codes, money notes and colours. Magnetically mounted on the wearer’s glasses frames, OrCam MyEye is a wearable assistive technology solution for vision impairment that can be activated by an intuitive pointing gesture.
OrCam Read, a handheld digital reader, empowers people with language processing challenges, including dyslexia. Leveraging OrCam’s computer vision technology, the lightweight OrCam Read is a personal AI reader that instantly captures and reads out loud full pages of text and digital screens.
The device features intuitive point-and-click operation, which activates two precision laser guidance options, to read the entire highlighted text or target where to begin reading.
Currently, the new assistive Smart Reading feature is only available in the US and Canada.