There’s been a lot of talk about the new audio component of the new Kindle 2, but turns out there are other devices that can do this too.

Check out this Voice Stick, which is an advanced optical character recognition scanner designed to make all books available to the visually impaired.

As you pass the wand over a page, optical character recognition technology translates it into text, and the text is read to you in a friendly voice. It can be used to convert any text from books, newspapers, contracts, mail, business cards, etc., into audio, listened to through headphones. The wand length is about the width of a page, making this device just as portable as the Kindle 2 and certainly just as helpful.