"GO AHEAD, I'M LISTENING" NEW GOOGLE VOICE TECHNOLOGY LEARNS TO RECOGNIZE ALTERNATE SPEECH PATTERNS
For people who stutter, using a digital voice assistant on your smart phone or smart speaker can be a trying experience. The same is true for using automated voice prompts on customer support hotlines. But recent developments in the tech community, led by Google, are evolving rapidly to meet the differing voice pattern needs of users across the world.
According to Bob MacDonald, Technical Program Manager at Google, significant progress is being made that can make it much easier for people with atypical speech patterns to be heard and understood by the artificial intelligence programs being integrated into more of the devices we use every day.
“Our goal is to help devices understand people who stutter as well as their own family members do,” said MacDonald. “It all started with Project Euphonia.”
someone, adjust lighting, or play a favorite song, they may not work as well for those with impaired speech.
According to MacDonald, Project Euphonia was originally started to help identify the progress of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, but research at Google has continued to broaden as efforts are showing great progress for recognizing commands from people with atypical speech patterns resulting from stroke, traumatic brain injury, deafness, Down syndrome, deafness, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and stuttering.
If you’re 18-years-of-age or older and have a voice that may be considered difficult to understand (but not because of an accent), you can assist Google in its research by recording a set of phrases.
PROJECT EUPHONIA
Project Euphonia is a Google Research initiative focused on helping people with atypical speech be better understood. The approach is centered on analyzing speech recordings to better train speech recognition models.
For millions of people around the world whose speech is difficult for others to understand, face- to-face communication can be very challenging. Using voice-activated technologies can be frustrating, too. While tools like Google Home or the Google Assistant can help people call
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