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Hi, I'm Maddy. 
I am a registered student at the Fred Smithers Centre.

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and I am also a part-time employee there.

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and today I'm going to be teaching you

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how to use Kurzweil 3000 text-to-speech.

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Kurzweil 3000 is an assistive tech software

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that can basically be used to read documents aloud

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but it can also help you with writing

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you can make notes directly on your readings

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you can also make audio notes instead of written notes
if a thought just comes to you in the moment

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and I'll be showing you how to use all of that

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here on a laptop that I've borrowed from the Fred Smithers Centre
that already has the software installed.

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So, I'll share my screen with you to get started.

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First, what we're going to do is we're going
to launch Kurzweil.

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So, the first thing that we'll get started with

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is the read function

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and we're going to upload a file.

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Hit file, open, I know that on my desktop I have this specific PDF.

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It's just loading in here now.

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It doesn't take very long to do that.

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It actually does it a lot quicker than you'd expect,

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especially for long documents.

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So, we've just got "The Tell-Tale Heart" here

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by Edgar Allan Poe. That's kind of just

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what we'll be using for a demo.

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So now that all of our pages are loaded in, 

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we'll go to the second page

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because that's where things kind of actually get going.

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So I'll click at the beginning of the text and then I will

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hit this green button in order to start the reading.

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"True! Nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am,

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but why will you say that I am-"

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So that's just a little bit of a demo of kind of what it sounds like,

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but if you click "Audio Options" there are also several ways

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to change the speed, the voice, the reading mode

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and yeah, there are a lot of options!

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While you're reading you can also use many of the features that are here on the left

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including Highlight, Add Text-Notes,

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you can look up words in the dictionary,

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you can get spellcheck, there are a lot of really helpful tips & tools.

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Something else that's really interesting about Kurzweil 3000 is

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that you can add voice notes. So if I had

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a specific thought that I wanted to add here 

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I could just click this button, add a voice note 

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and it will begin recording and I can speak into this here,

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leave my little voice note and then click done.

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And I'll make sure that after I've done that,

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if you use the voice notes, 

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make sure that you save the document as a Kurzweil document,

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because that's the way you'll be able to access those audio files.

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Next we will move ahead to the Write feature.

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The Write feature doesn't have too too many

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elements that are different than the read-aloud portion,

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the Write version, however, does give you the option to

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make a brainstorm, where you can basically

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branch off of a main idea.

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This can be really helpful for developing ideas for essays and arguments,  

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and any kind of assignment that you have

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so that you can have it in the same place as all your notes.

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And the scan feature is pretty self-explanatory.

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You can basically just hook yourself up to a scanner

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and through the "Scanner Set-Up"

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you can select your specific scanner

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and then you can get it to scan a document for you.

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If you have a document that was, for example, 

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handed out to you in class 

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and you would like to use Kurzweil to make notes on it, 

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you can scan the document in your printer or your scanner,

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and you can upload the file.

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It can essentially help turn documents that weren't 

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easily speech-to-text accessible

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then become speech-to-text accessible. 

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And once again you can continue to use

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a series of really useful hacks and treats on the side

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to help make your notes more you, more unique and more personalized!

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So that's Kurzweil 3000

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and if you are interested in this or any of our other assistive tech

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you should check out some of our other demo videos on our website!

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Thanks!