Press Release September 2013

Bayer HealthCare’s Grants4Apps awards €10,000 innovation grant to BigFONT app for iPhone

San Diego, CA / Berlin, Germany, 9/30/2013 – Speech Technology Group was awarded an innovation grant of €10,000 (about $13,000) by Grants4Apps™ to add new features to their BigFONT app for iPhone. Grants4Apps™ is a newly launched open innovation initiative by Germany’s health industry heavyweight Bayer HealthCare. With users in over 15 countries, BigFONT is the first app that allows millions of people who have difficulties with the small print on their iPhones to read mobile web pages with ease.

Now BigFONT gets another new useful feature – an OCR Reader for the day-to-day struggles of hard to read labels, menus and other printed material with small text. After snapping a picture with their iPhone camera, users will see the text from the photo extracted into clearly readable large print on their display. To make it even easier, the built-in Text-to-Speech engine reads the text back to the user at the push of a button.

Today the majority of adults are now wearing glasses or contacts. The app provides a number of innovative features to help coping with small print. To browse the web with ease, users may set custom zoom levels for their built-in iPhone browser to increase even the tiniest print on many mobile and regular websites to a comfortable reading size. Now everybody can enjoy large-size text that is automatically reformatted to stay inside the display, no matter how big it is.

“I personally think BigFONT will help many people who, like myself, are not able anymore to read like a 20-year old.” says Dr. Jesus del Valle, Head O&I R&D IT Innovations from Bayer HealthCare, who is in charge of the Grants4Apps initiative.

To magnify print or small objects, an additional feature in the app transforms the iPhone into a portable magnifying glass with zoom levels of up to 8-times the original size.

The included 3D- stereogram exercises can help to protect the users’ vision by reducing digital eye strain when looking all day into a computer monitor. The GPS based optometrist finder provides patient review ratings and driving directions.

“With so many people having vision problems, BigFONT includes the full spectrum of vision-aid tools to help people throughout their day to read with ease.” says Speech Technology Group’s President Gerd Graumann.

Go to www.bigfont.net for more details and a free desktop version of BigFONT WebZoom.

To download BigFONT at the App Store, go to www.bigfont.net/getmebigfont

About BigFont:

BigFONT was created by Speech Technology Group, a provider of highly accurate speech recognition and natural sounding text-to-speech solutions that help millions of business users and also people with vision impairments to regain their independence and participate both in regular life as well as the digital world.

About Bayer HealthCare Grants4Apps:

The Bayer HealthCare Grants4Apps™ initiative supports innovative app projects that are contributing to the improvement of general health and pharmaceutical processes. After receiving a large number of submissions, Grants4Apps™ selected 23 innovative healthcare startups and developer teams. The successful submissions receive a grant of €5,000 or €10,000 to assist in the building and creation of their app projects.