Kurzweil 3000: Pay a Lot, Get a Lot
By Williams, John M.; Business Week Online,Publication Date: May 2001
Article on Kurzweil 3000 Version 5.0 from Kurzweil Educational Systems Inc. Kurzweil 3000 is an optical character recognition program with voice output that reads electronic or scanned text aloud with a remarkably human-sounding synthetic voice. It also highlights each word as the program speaks it. This makes Kurzweil an effective tool for teaching people with learning disabilities to read more effectively. The author asserts that every school and employer in the country should have a copy of the program: the US Department of Education reports that in 1997 to 1998, nearly three million learning disabled students were enrolled in primary and secondary schools and colleges. Other estimates place the number of Americans with learning disabilities at anywhere from five million to thirty million. The author gave the program a "test drive," and was very impressed with the simplicity of its use, the versatile array of features, and the human-sounding quality of its voice. The program is easy to install on Windows 2000, and can be used with Windows 95, 98, and on an NT operating system. The author was impressed with many of the features. File, edit, scan, view, tools, and reference features can be pulled down from the top bar. It was simple to use different word processing programs with speech recognition. One special feature of Kurzweil 3000 is that it can switch to accommodate users accustomed to regional accents, and faster readings do not distort the clarity. The program also understands words in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch, and comes in Windows and Mac versions.
Assistive Products Discussed: KURZWEIL 3000 FOR MACINTOSH
KURZWEIL 3000 FOR WINDOWS
Published by: McGraw-Hill Companies (Website:http://www.mcgraw-hill.com)
Link to text: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may2001/nf20010531_721.htm
