In a written response to a question in Lok Sabha, Singh said the device is available to the visually impaired individuals and institutions through online registration and booking on divyanayan.csio.res.in/registration.php.
    
“DivyaNayan is a personal reading machine for the visually impaired developed by CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIO), Chandigarh where any printed or digital document can be accessed in the form of speech output,” Singh said.
    
The minister said, based on the principle of contact scanning, it can analyse a multi column document and provide seamless reading. The user can place the device over the document to be read and manually scan it.
    
The reading device uses language-dependent optical character recognition to convert the image into text and a text to speech converter, further converts the text into audio.
    
Audio files stored in the machine can be played andt he device is handheld, standalone, portable, completely wireless and IoT enabled.
    
“It is currently available in Hindi, English, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Punjabi but is further compatible for other Indian and foreign languages. It has interfaces such as USB, Bluetooth, Wi-fi, LAN, and headphone,” Singh said.