I’ve seen plenty of devices that turn pages for you, but Ninomiya-kun takes things a step further by actually reading books aloud.

Ninomiya-kun can analyse and distinguish about 2,300 Japanese characters from actual paper books. Impressive, but in an age where text-to-speech is already showing up on ebooks, one has to wonder if technology like this is really necessary. Currently we have like what…less than 1% literacy rate among robots? Reading is fundamental people. [Yomiuri via Crunchgear]