A blind person can interact with her personal reading-navigation systems through voice communication, kind of like a Seeing Eye dog that reads and talks.
partialTwo blind graders agree (D7, rule D16). Not in the audit sample (D11).
Grader A: partial
Blind users had separate talking devices in 2009 (KNFB Reader Mobile for print, Trekker Breeze for GPS). These spoke to the user but were controlled mainly with buttons, not voice commands, and reading and navigation were not combined in one conversational assistant. Voice-controlled assistants came with Siri in 2011, but a combined reading-navigation companion was not common by 2014.
Test: Existence of voice-interactive reading-navigation systems: speech output devices existed (met partly); two-way voice interaction in a combined system (not met by 2009).
Blind users interacted with reading and GPS devices mainly through speech output and keys; spoken-command interaction came with smartphone assistants (Siri 2011) and was not the standard mode in 2009.
Test: Share test: voice-output devices >5% of blind tech users; two-way voice interaction mainstream after 2011.
Wikipedia: KNFB Reader (accessed 2026-09-28): Original camera+PDA reader $3,495 (2006); Nokia N82 version $1,595; iOS app $99 in 2014, Android soon after; reads documents, screens, ePubs.
Wikipedia: Speech recognition (accessed 2026-09-28): GOOG-411 2007; deep learning cut error rates from 2009; Siri used Nuance; Microsoft reached human parity on Switchboard only in 2017.
All captured fields
rank
53
kind
decade_prediction
section
Disabilities
subject
Voice-operated assistive technology for the blind
target year
2009
timing
in
position
Chapter 9, "2009"; item Disabilities 6 in Kurzweil 2010, p. 47
confidence
high
note
Wording as reproduced by the author in "How My Predictions Are Faring" (2010); book page not given there. Subject label is the essay's own item heading.