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Show HN: App for my grandpa to help him read printed text (OCR+TTS)

3 pointsby artpiover 5 years ago

1 comment

artpiover 5 years ago
My grandpa (88 y&#x2F;o) is pretty active, but his eyesight is very bad. He manages to use his tablet in limited ways because some apps can make the font enormous.<p>But what is really problematic is the tiny text on prescriptions, medicine leaflets, bus stop timetable, etc. I get a call at least once a week that some letter has come in and he cannot read it and I need to help him. (the most annoying part is that&#x27;s usually spam or some incomprehensible gov document sent for compliance).<p>So I built an app for him, where he can snap a photo and it is recognized and later read out loud to him.<p>Stack:<p>- A Web App (full JavaScript)<p>- Native camera capture<p>- Google Cloud Vision for OCR<p>- Web Speech API for Text-To-Speech<p>All Open Source, available here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;artpi&#x2F;help-me-read" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;artpi&#x2F;help-me-read</a> . Google Cloud Vision API is called directly from JavaScript (if you have a token), so you don&#x27;t have to rely on my servers. PRs welcome :)