Talking Text Reader: Camera OCR Read Aloud

Tesseract is a free OCR engine with English and Spanish language packs. Paired with the Piper voice engine, a Pi becomes an offline reading assistant.

Mission steps

1. Install OCR

   sudo apt install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-spa for Spanish support.

2. Install Piper

   Download Piper for ARM64 and a voice model (see the talking assistant guide).

3. Mount the camera

   Point it straight down at a page with even lighting; a desk-lamp arm works great.

4. Wire a button

   Button on GPIO17: press to capture, OCR and speak.

5. Improve accuracy

   Use high resolution, convert to grayscale and increase contrast before OCR.

Code

#!/bin/bash
# read.sh — capture, recognize, speak (Spanish example)
rpicam-still -n -t 500 --width 2304 --height 1296 -o /tmp/page.jpg
tesseract /tmp/page.jpg /tmp/page -l spa
./piper/piper --model voices/es_ES-davefx-medium.onnx --output_file /tmp/read.wav < /tmp/page.txt
aplay /tmp/read.wav

Tip: test every script on the bench before installing it in a moving machine.

Questions