Elumo, a developer of aids for the blind and visually impaired, has launched TextScout, a speech-empowered technology that turns a mobile phone into a reading assistant.

The smartphone application uses the built-in camera of the mobile phone to capture the text, scan it and turn it into speech to read it to the user. TextScout recognizes all kinds of printed documents, whatever the text and the format are, including letters, price tags, shopping receipts, invoices, flyers, business cards, magazines and restaurant menus.

?By launching TextScout, elumo aims at providing visually impaired people a way to access text while on the way,? said Christian Bott, managing director of elumo, Münster, Germany.

?TextScout features an alignment assistant that helps blind people to align their phone's camera to the text they want to read,? he said. ?After the image has been taken, it is sent to a server on the Internet, which processes the image in the cloud and delivers the result as a text file back to the phone.

?The text is then read aloud by Acapela's text-to-speech system.?

The end user listens to the vocalization of the written information he or she needs easily, quickly and autonomously.

TextScout is available in German and English and new languages will be added soon.

Acapela Group is a European voice expert that invents text-to-speech services, giving content a voice in up to 25 languages.

This is not the first time a company is turning text into voice or vice versa.

For example, earlier this year Common Voices announced the availability of enhanced voicemail for Android G1 phones using the T-Mobile network.

The free service called NowMessage.com removes the restrictions of traditional network-based voicemail by leveraging the email and display capabilities of the G1 smartphone (see story).

Additionally, YouMail is also a visual voicemail provider. The technology allows users to treat their voicemail messages like email. They are able to view the voicemails online or via their mobile phone and can pick and choose which ones they want to listen to, forward on and reply to (see story). 

?Text recognition has been around on stationary PCs for a while now,? Mr. Bott said. ?Elumo now makes this technology available everywhere, anytime, enabling blind people to access textual information when they else would have had to ask someone else to help them read.

?More and more innovative Web services like TextScout are going to be made available on mobile devices,? he said. ?They are going to be ubiquitous, featuring specialized applications that help us organize our daily lives in a more efficient and comfortable way than we ever had.

?As our society is becoming more and more mobile and demanding. New technology helps us keep track with the information we need for our mobile lifestyle ? anywhere and anytime.?

Jordan Crook did the reporting for this story.