Talkitt- A Life Changer For Those With Speech Impairments

This is a guest post by Nicole Caron. Thanks to Nicole.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to not be able to express and communicate your thoughts and feelings? This is an everyday reality for millions of people (1.5% of the Western World’s population) who suffer from speech disabilities. This is very hard and frustrating for them and affects much larger circles in society such as families, caregivers, friends and society as a whole. These individuals are unable to be socially included in schools and work places and enjoy social activities; simple interactions a normally functioning individual would take for granted.

Until now the approach taken by developers of assistive technology for people with speech disabilities has completely bypassed voice, opting to use other modes of communication including communication boards that replace speech with symbols and images, head-tracking, eye-tracking, and switches. These solutions are often expensive, awkward and unnatural to use and degrade natural speech. There are no products on the market today that allow people with speech disabilities to communicate using their voice. This is the gap Voiceitt is trying to fill. Voiceitt is developing Talkitt, an innovative speech technology which is able recognize unintelligible language and translate it into understandable speech. Ultimately, Talkitt is giving individuals with speech impairments their voice back! Talkitt’s slogan is “This is my voice”.

TalkItt is a voice to voice application that will translate distorted pronunciation into understandable speech. For example, a person can say “o-ko-la” and software will translate it to “chocolate”. The software is in the development stage. Talkitt is speaker dependent and requires the user to create and maintain a dictionary of utterances and associated text and/or icons. The creation of the dictionary is the calibration phase. Once a dictionary is ready, a recognition stage may begin the application will perform pattern matching with enhancement of intonation features. If the user puts a word into the dictionary then the application will be able to recall that word at a later date and relay what the person is trying to say. The user will be able to access the application without help because during the recognition phase it is fully voice activated. The dictionary can be categorized so as to reduce to reduce mistakes by the machine. There is a possibility for having the same word in several different situations making the application dynamic.

Our approach is based on simultaneous exploitation of both the content and the intonation of a speaker voice. Talkitt is based on multi-domain signal processing, and pruning of dynamic voice pattern classifier search space, boosting recognition by adaptive learning of speech pattern. An example for one of VoiceItt’s innovative approaches is adaptive framing – an approach based on speech events that enables the division of speech to homogenic frames – this approach results with frames that contain the same vocal information but with varying durations. This duration is determined by the vocal information itself, thus allowing a much more accurate modelling and classification steps.

Talkitt does not require hardware and can run on any computerized device (PC, tablet or smartphone) and can be integrated in Apps (browsers, games, communication boards) and assistive devices (smart phone, wheelchairs, emergency calls). This software-based solution gained enthusiasm from field expert’s worldwide (speech therapists, University professors, occupational therapists) and has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of life of millions of people. Please visit our indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to see Talkitt in action! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/talkitt-this-is-my-voice