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A picture may be worth a thousand words, but until now it hasn’t been able to
say them. Kodak is now aiming to change that and make snapshots talk (EP 926
879). A new digital stills camera will have a microphone which stores around 10
seconds of sound when a picture is taken. So the photographer can say what the
picture shows, where it was taken and why. An ink-jet prints the picture image
onto paper, with the speech data converted into a bar code strip running along
the bottom. This can then be read by an infrared scanner which is swiped over
the print. The scanner converts the code into sound–so the picture speaks
for itself.