Origin Of The Intel® Reader

The Intel® Reader is the result of the real-life experiences of an Intel employee, coupled with decades of technology innovation and Intel’s commitment to proactive healthcare.

The idea started with Ben Foss, director of access technology for Intel, who was identified with dyslexia in elementary school. Through high school, college, and graduate school, he had to depend on others to read to him, or struggled through the slow process of getting words of a page. In graduate school, he relied on prerecorded audio content or had to wait for school resources to scan course content and run text-to-speech conversions, making it difficult to keep up with his class work. As an adult, much of the content he wanted, from professional journals to pleasure reading, just wasn’t available in audio form.

"Necessity is motivating," Ben says, “But frustration is the real mother of invention.” As a technologist, Ben reasoned that there had to be a way to convert text to speech quickly and conveniently, anywhere and anytime. He experimented with photographing text and running optical character recognition (OCR) software on the photos.

Convinced that Intel® technology could solve the problem, Ben went to Intel® Health and asked for funding to explore his product idea to help all people who have difficulty with text.

The Intel Reader has gone through many changes since then, from the first prototype, made from a cut-up styrofoam cooler and a taped-on lens to today’s high-resolution display and sleek, magnesium case. Foss says the design has been guided by three principles: accuracy, convenience, and discretion.

From the early stages of design, the Intel team has gathered input from hundreds of potential users. Their input has led to lots of ergonomic and interface refinements that make the Reader easy and convenient to use and handle, and it has generated ideas such as the Intel® Portable Capture Station that allows quick, accurate capture of longer texts.

The Intel® Atom™ processor delivers plenty of processing power for quick text-to-speech conversion and content management features in an ultra-mobile, battery-efficient form factor. Intel technology and Intel’s industry relationships have helped create a design that combines comprehensive reading features and quality components such as the full-color LCD display and the open source Linux* operating system.

Independent living is about self-determination: giving people the ability to help themselves. The Intel Reader is intended to remove barriers for people who have difficulty reading printed text. Ben Foss asks, “Would your life be easier if you had a device that read out loud to you?” If the answer is yes, the Intel Reader was created for you.