Kurzweil 1000 is reading software that makes printed or electronic text accessible to people who are blind or have limited vision. It is the direct descendent of the first reading machine for the blind invented by Ray Kurzweil in 1976.

Using Optical Character Recognition and Text to Speech technology combined with a unique audible user interface, Kurzweil 1000 converts the printed word into speech. Users can scan in books, articles, bills, and advertisements - almost anything that fits on a scanner, so they can quickly have the information read aloud. Moreover, the text can be saved in Kurzweil's accessible format for future reference and modification.

Current Kurzweil 1000 users have a great deal of control over how they manage the information they access and many tools to assist them in mastering it. To name a few, they can choose from numerous reading voices, set the reading speed and pitch, skim, summarize, look up words using a built in dictionary, create and edit new documents, check for spelling errors, set bookmarks and as of our latest version, share documents or excerpts through conventional e-mail applications.

Scanning and reading printed text with accuracy, speed and reliability continues to be the foundation of Kurzweil 1000, but it has evolved into a much more versatile tool. As of the latest release, Version 7, Kurzweil 1000 can open and read a broad variety of electronic text formats, efficiently search, download and read electronic books directly from Bookshare.org and other electronic book repositories, send files and excerpts to familiar e-mail applications, FAX and photocopy text and images, and much more.

More than ever, Kurzweil 1000 provides multiple avenues of accessible information, making printed pages and electronic archives more available and more useful to learners everywhere.

• Accurate optical character recognition (OCR)
  Kurzweil 1000 incorporates multiple OCR engines which are updated continuously to provide the most accurate available recognition of pages in their original format.
• Clear, flexible synthetic speech
  The human sounding RealSpeak™ and responsive IBM Via Voice™ **distinguish Kurzweil 1000's superior text to speech (TTS) options. For those users who prefer hardware speech synthesizers, Version 7 supports DECTalk Express, DoubleTalk LT, and TripleTalk for Microsoft Windows® NT, 2000 and XP.
• Multi Language support
  Kurzweil 1000 can recognize text in over 170 languages and can read text aloud in English, British English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
• Flexible editing and text management tools
  Kurzweil 1000 has an easy to use text editor, dictionary and thesaurus, allowing accessible modification and mastery of existing documents and easy creation of new ones. Users can set the product to speak as they type each letter or word. Study tools such as bookmarks, annotations, skimming and summarization add further reinforcement.
• Easier access to online books
  Users can more quickly obtain online e-books because Kurzweil 1000 efficiently performs title or author searches of multiple websites, presents choices for download and retrieves books - without the need for manual searches of individual websites. What's more, the new book feature in Version 7 includes a direct connection to Bookshare.org, the online community that allows people with reading-related disabilities to legally download thousands of copyrighted books. Users can not only access Bookshare.org more easily from within Kurzweil 1000, they also get a free 30-day trial membership with their Kurzweil 1000 purchase.
• Low Vision Features
  In addition to display, magnification and highlighting of text as it is read aloud, Kurzweil 1000 can retain and enhance images from scanned pages.
• Sending files to portable devices
  Kurzweil 1000 can send files to Braille Note, Blazie and Road Runner devices, creating new options for making work, correspondence and pleasure reading portable
• Layout exploration and navigation
  Kurzweil 1000 can identify the position and sequence of words, blocks of text, or regions containing images, enhancing not only navigating but understanding a document as a whole.
• Kurzweil Virtual Printer™
  PDF files, and any other file type that can be printed by an application on your computer, can now be opened and read with Kurzweil 1000.
• Printer and embosser properties
  Kurzweil 1000 provides control of printer margins, orientation and paper size and accommodates Braille embossers, allowing adjustments to number of cells per line, lines per page, treatment of page breaks, and interpoint.
• MP3 file creation
  Kurzweil 1000 can create MP3 audio files based on selected documents, text and voices, adding the convenience of hearing Kurzweil read on portable players.