Microsoft’s co-founder is one of the inventors of a revolutionary technology

Aug 21, 2013 08:24 GMT  ·  By

Text-to-speech technologies have been around for a while, but Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and a group of inventors are now working on something that’s a lot more innovative than that.

The Business Journal writes that Bill Gates, Intellectual Ventures co-founder Nathan Myhrvold, and other 8 people have filed a patent for a text-to-video technology that could get the green light for production anytime soon.

Even though it sounds a bit awkward to convert text to video, the purpose of the new system is actually pretty impressive. Here’s what the patent application explains, according to the aforementioned source:

“According to one contemplated scenario, a student is assigned a reading assignment. To make the assignment more interesting, the student may use his or her mobile phone to take a picture of a page of the textbook. The systems and methods described herein may then generate a synthesized image sequence of the action occurring in the text.

“Thus, rather than simply reading names and dates, the student may see soldiers running across a battlefield. The systems and methods may further gather auxiliary information (e.g., the color of the soldiers' uniforms, the topographical layout of the battlefield, what the generals looked like, time of year, weather conditions, etc.), which may be incorporated into the synthesized image sequences.”

In just a few words, this means that any student could easily take a photo of a page and then let the application create a video that illustrates every single word mentioned in the text.

What’s more, the technology can even recognize handwriting, while also including translation features, which makes it helpful regardless of the language you’re using.

There’s no word on any potential launch date or anything like that, but rumor is that Bill Gates is planning to use the new tech in his education efforts across the world.