Voice Stick

red dot
red dot award: design concept 2008

initiator:

Park Sung Woo

Voice Stick is a portable text-scanning device for the visually impaired. It scans typewritten letters, recognises the text and converts the written information into voice.

The aim of Voice Stick is to improve the access of blind and visually impaired people to written information. It incorporates scanning technology with voice output technology. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology scans typewritten text and translates it into machine-editable text. Voice Stick uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology to take the OCR scanned text and translate it into voice form. To use Voice Stick, turn on the power, plug the earphones into the device, place Voice Stick on the document to be scanned, press the scan button and then press the play button to hear a voice read the printed text.