Led by Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, U of I professor of electrical and computer engineering, the new Speech Accessibility Project brings in collaborators from faculty in linguistics, speech and hearing science, and information technology professionals from Beckman Institute, and it will be supported by tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
The aim of the project is to “make voice recognition technology more useful for people with a range of diverse speech patterns and disabilities.” It will address the needs of people whose voice patterns aren’t always detected by current technologies, including people with ALS, cerebral palsy, and Down’s Syndrome. The project will involved obtaining speech sample from paid volunteers and creating a dataset that can be used to train machine learning models.
Read more about the project at Beckman Institute’s website.
Top photo from Beckman Institute.