Get a Raspberry Pi, SD card, webcam and other necessary hardware (see components list). You can ignore the additional components needed only for development.

Download the light version of Raspbian from the download page of the raspberry.org website.

Create a bootable SD card from the downloaded image.

Boot up the Raspberry Pi and connect to it using the USB-TTY serial cable, and temporarily plug in a WiFi dongle or USB ethernet connector into the USB port.

Log into the Pi (using the default "pi" user). Use "raspi-config" and perform the initial Pi setup (expanding the OS to use all of the space on the SD card etc.). Reboot the Pi.

Configure the network settings for your ethernet or WiFi network and reboot the Pi.

Update the default Raspbian components using "sudo apt-get update".

Download and install the "fswebcam" software by entering "sudo apt-get install fswebcam".

Download and install the OCR software by entering the following commands:

• sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
• sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-eng

You can install support for additional languages by repeating the last command, changing the "-eng" suffix into another ISO 639 language code (not all languages are supported though).

Download and install the text-to-speech software using the command:

• sudo apt-get install festival