In between evangelising about the Singularity and appearing in an unfeasable number of interviews and conferences, Ray Kurzweil likes to crank out the occasional innovative invention. His latest output is a device that can photo-scan text documents, and read them back to a blind user. Kurzweil has always had a soft-spot for reading machines, and this is the latest in a line of devices that started with his first washing-machine sized prototype back in 1981.