An innovation oftentimes emerge from the mix of concepts. The web got here upon existence by becoming a member of two applied sciences that already existed for quite some time: (1) the TCP/IP protocol suite, and (2) the notion of Hypertext. A great instance is the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. User interfaces for people with disabilities, speech synthesizers, and VoIP applications, are all technologies that already existed for quite some time. What we did was to marry them together, and by doing that, we consider we’ve got created an innovation, one thing that didn’t exist before and that opens a window for a brand new world of communications, studying, and socialization, for people with voice disabilities. EasyVoice has in itself many things in common with the creation of the net. This work was sponsored by Fundação Caloust Gulbenkian under grant Proc. 65538, and in addition by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT/MCTES) under grant POCI/CED/62497/2004.
Within EasyVoice, the consumer can define his own abbreviations and the system automatically replaces every abbreviation by the corresponding phrases, earlier than sending it to the speech synthesizer. The final characteristic is a digital keyboard with a scanning system included. Many individuals can not control their hands with sufficient accuracy to make use of an everyday pc keyboard, and generally only have the power to manage a single contact button. Virtual keyboards are an affordable resolution to solve some of these limitations. With a scanning system, a set of choices is presented to the person on the pc display screen, and a visible cursor advances by way of the options, one at time, at a specified time price. Sometimes an possibility is just a container for more options. Is referred to as a group choice. The person responds by pressing a contact button each time the cursor is on high of the desired choice. This paper introduced EasyVoice, a system that combines current technologies in a novel approach for helping people with voice disabilities.
There’s a text panel on the top half where the person can sort. Below the text panel there are two checklist bins. The one on the left half is an inventory of recently typed messages, and on the suitable half is a listing of attainable words given by the word completion algorithm. With the archive in hand, the user doesn’t must retype the message and might merely choose it from the list again. The archive of lately typed messages is useful as a result of throughout a dialog it is many instances necessary to repeat some words or phrases. The phrase completion algorithm searches in a built-in dictionary for those words which have as a prefix the sequence of letters typed by the user thus far. It is not uncommon for folks to make use of abbreviations when writing. Another necessary characteristic is the abbreviation system. For example, in English it is common for people to make use of “btw” as an abbreviation of “by the way”.
Application examples embrace the use of display-readers for individuals with visible impairment, in addition to to assist people with dyslexia and other studying difficulties. Another necessary utilization, as we’re about to see on this paper, is to aid these with extreme voice disabilities. With EasyVoice, the sound is injected instantly via the network rather than being sent to the computer speakers. With textual content-to-speech, a person sorts at a keyboard, the text is synthesized, and the sound comes out via the computer audio system. Any speech synthesizer can be used as long as it’s SAPI 5 compliant. The present implementation of EasyVoice works below Microsoft Windows. SAPI stands for Speech Application Programming Interface. It’s an API developed by Microsoft to permit using Speech Recognition. Notice that one may think that there is no must do any particular integration between a speech synthesizer and a VoIP application. Speech Synthesis inside Windows functions. After all, one might merely use a speech synthesizer and let the computer’s microphone be close sufficient to the pc speakers.
This paper presents EasyVoice, a system that integrates voice synthesis with Skype. EasyVoice permits a person with voice disabilities to speak with one other person located anywhere on this planet, removing an important obstacle that affect these individuals throughout a phone or VoIP-based mostly dialog. Voice over IP (VoIP) purposes have turn out to be very fashionable lately. People with voice disabilities, however, are oftentimes not able to use a VoIP software (or, as a matter of truth, a regular or Canada cellphone) to be able to have a dialog with one other particular person. These applications allow folks to talk without cost over the Internet and likewise to make conventional calls via the general public-Switched Telephone Network at a small fraction of the cost offered by conventional phone corporations. A minor voice incapacity might not be an enormous obstacle, but for those with severe voice disabilities, a phone conversation is one thing almost impossible to realize. For these instances, the one hope appears to be the utilization of a text-to-speech (TTS) system together with a VoIP application.
Let your voice be heard
