Kurzweil's machine reads aloud

On 13 January 1976 Raymond Kurzweil and James Gashel of the National Federation of the Blind showed reporters a machine that reads print aloud: a scanner with a camera under glass, a minicomputer that recognises the letters and turns them into speech, and Braille-marked keys with which a blind reader directs it.

By The New York Times report, at the Cambridge demonstration the machine read the Gettysburg Address typed on an electric typewriter; the speech was "sing-song, mechanical" and at times less comprehensible than that shown at MIT the same day. A word could be repeated or spelled out, a line gone back over. At least two systems were being built under a $161,000 federal contract, to be tested for 18 months at the Perkins School and in Boston public schools; the company named $25,000 to institutions, later $10,000. The Federation announced $130,000 in grants toward a $367,000 programme for six machines. Dennis Klatt wrote in 1987 that the speech of the first Votrax-based versions was "only marginally intelligible". Kurzweil himself, in July 1975, described a desk-top reading unit about 18 inches high and two feet wide and long, and a separate control unit with a minicomputer, reading "most standard type styles". The record does not claim a price near $50,000 or who bought the first one: the sources read do not say so.