Why Kurzweil?

[leadinglabbie]

I now have K1000 on my laptop. (The DSS office can get me an edited copy of my accounting book in Kurzweil format. The law school bought a copy of the software last year (I actually didn't ask for it and in fact told them I didn't need it, but...). Apparently, they did install it on one of the lab machines, but they then removed it later. Possibly

Comments

[etana]

It's really not all that great - but colleges buy it (I think because Kurzweil is a famous tech guy) and it generally gets all free to blinks in college so it's *great.* I still don't know how to do cool things in it and my scans aren't pretty.
But it's free.

[leadinglabbie]

Thanks. My Abbyy was free, too, from the Department for the Blind. It actually costs about half of what Kurzweil costs. Am I (or is the state) paying extra for this screen-reading capability which I don't even want? Our taxes are actually paying for this if it's bought by a state blindness agency. (I'm not sure about the law school's copy. Technically, UVA is a state school, but the law school doesn't receive state funding for anything other than maintenance, as far as I know.) So it just seems to me like it's not a great investment.

I think Kurzweil has done some great things, and I do love my KNFB Reader! But I think we're reaching the point where main-stream OCR technology is practical for blinks in many situations.

OK, sorry I sent you my rant. :)

[etana]

No I totally agree - I see no reason in investing in pricey name-driven anything, but brand marketing goes a long way it seems. I think Kurzweil gets bought because it's so well known. People don't realize that there are other softwares that can do as much and if not more and cost less. Expensive = amazingness, dontchaknow?
The screen-reading part comes with it, I don't know why. It drives me nuts because I have to commit to de-activating everything else to scan a book. But now I have two laptops, and since one is old and can only stay in one place to work I'm going to commit it to scanning and get rid of everything else on it and the other I'll keep kurzweil on just in case.
Yeah.
And stuff.

[sophiahagia]

Er, I use it because it's what I learned how to scan with in high school, and that's what they gave me when I went off to college because I already knew how to use it. It gets the job done, but scanning is one of my least favorite things to do. I've never tried any other OCR software (except Omnipage waaaay back in the day, and that went... badly).

[leadinglabbie]

Thanks for the info. I'm pretty sure I can save the images with Abbyy, too. I figured you could save in a more user-friendly format, but DSS person wants to send it to me as a .kes file, so...

(Plus, I figured I might as well try it since, y'know, it's free...)

[nihilistech]

Depending on someone's comfort level with technology, K1000 can be good because it does allow a certain kind of more seemless scanning than Omnipage did/(does?). You can have it use Finereader as it's OCR engine (that's customizable). I think part of the appeal is that it does let you choose between OCR engines, and the currency ID feature.

[leadinglabbie]

I was hoping you'd jump in. :) It makes sense to me that some people could definitely benefit from its user-friendliness. But Abbyy is pretty user-friendly at this point, too, and even OmniPage (which I had to use this summer at my law firm) has gotten better. Still, I can see how some people would definitely prefer the K1000 interface.

Doesn't K1000 use older versions of the OCR engines? Of course, once you have a certain level of accuracy, maybe it can't be improved upon all that much. And currency recognition is definitely a good thing!

Ah well, it'll be fun to play with, anyway.

[nihilistech]

The summary feature is kind of cool, but I never had reason to use it much.

But yeah. If you're comfortable with Abbyy, there's no reason to change.

[lonejedi]

Well, to hell with all of that. I use OpenBook and have never had difficulties. As it's an FS product, it opperates with JFW very well. When OpenBook is loaded, JFW shuts up and immediately runs if you switch to another task or close the program. Otherwise, OpenBook uses IBM TTS or RealSpeak. And, it also uses a variety of options for OCR. Yeah. I never got the whole KES thing, either. Though, I'd love a KNFB Reader. Blah. Oh, and you can do all sorts of things like prepare faxes and copies with OpenBook as well as change to a variety of formats including doc and pdf.

[lonejedi]

And it also identifies money.

[nihilistech]

Uh, okay.

K1000 does all of that, including Jaws shutting up when it loads. And it uses Neospeech and Realspeak as well.
I'm glad you're happy with what you use.