Digital Air Pen Scanner, Highlighter and Reader
Digital Air Pen Scanner, Highlighter and Reader
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Handheld pen scanner
Drag it along a line and the words appear on your screen
It is a small black wand about the size of a fat marker pen, with a lit window in its angled foot. Rest the foot on a printed line, draw it across at a steady walking pace, and the sentence types itself into whatever you had the cursor in.
That is the whole product. There is no screen on it, no memory in it and nothing to read back from it. It is an input device: a keyboard whose keys happen to be a page of print.
How it actually works
It reads the line, it does not photograph the page
A small LED in the foot lights a narrow strip of paper and a sensor behind the clear window reads it as you move. Software on the other end turns those pixels into characters and sends them through as keystrokes.
Because it works a line at a time, it is good at the thing a phone camera is bad at: pulling one sentence out of a page without capturing the whole page, and doing it into a document you already have open.
It scans printed text. It is not built for handwriting, and it does not scan pictures or lay out a page.
Getting it connected
Bluetooth, or the cable in the box
It pairs over Bluetooth with a computer, a phone or a tablet. If your Windows PC has no Bluetooth built in, the small USB dongle in the box gives it some. On a Mac it connects to the Bluetooth already in the machine, and the dongle stays in the box.
There is a USB cable too, which both charges it and gives you a wired connection if you would rather not pair anything.
The pen on its own does nothing. The manufacturer's companion software has to be installed on the device you are scanning into, and it is that software, not the pen, that decides which languages it can read and what it can do with the text afterwards.
Reading it back out loud
The app can speak what you scanned, and that is all we will say about it
The companion software has a text-to-speech function. Scan a passage and it can read it aloud through your computer or phone.
Plenty of people prefer hearing a paragraph to reading it, and plenty of people work faster with both at once. That is a genuine reason to want this and it is a preference, not a therapy.
What we are not going to do is tell you what it will do for anyone's reading, learning or concentration. This is a consumer gadget. It has not been assessed or approved as an assistive or a medical device and we do not sell it as one. If you are looking for reading support for a diagnosed difficulty, the people who made the diagnosis are the right people to ask what would actually help, and this page is not evidence for anything.
Being straight with you
The numbers we took off this page
This listing used to carry a speed comparison against typing, a language count and an accuracy adjective. None of them came with a source we could stand behind for the unit we ship, so all three are gone rather than restated.
Here is the honest version. How well it reads depends on the print in front of it: crisp black text on white paper at a normal book size reads well, and faint print, glossy stock, tight columns, unusual typefaces and a shaky hand all make it worse. Most people are clumsy with it for the first ten minutes and fine after that.
You will still correct the odd word. That is normal for this kind of device and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
Specifications
What is actually known
The length is approximate and taken from the supplier's own photography rather than a published dimension sheet. Where a number is not in this table it is because we could not verify it, not because it does not exist.
For the sentence you want out of the book and into the document
No screen, no photographs, no retyping. Rest it on the line and pull.
