Friday, January 14, 2005

Cellphone features OCR, text-to-speech

We’ve gotten used to cellphones being able to handle voice commands (though we still haven’t programmed voice tags into our phone). Now the Korea-only Pantech & Curitel PH-K2500V has upped the ante and then some. The phone provides text-to-speech functionality for text messages, call logs and address book entries. Additionally, the phone offers what may be a first: built-in OCR software that can pull text out of images shot with its camera. In theory, that means you can snap pics of business cards and import the info into your address book. We’re not sure if this actually works, or if you end up with useless gibberish, but it’s a concept worth watching.

No comments: