Assistive app set to empower communication for those with speech impairments
A new speech recognition app has been launched, which empowers individuals to navigate their environments and control smart home devices using their own voice commands. This might include turning on lights, listening to music, closing doors or creating shopping lists.
The app can be downloaded for free by individuals or in volume by institutions, nursing facilities and organisations.
Voiceitt, a speech recognition company for non-standard speech, launched the new app, which is available here on the Apple Store. It will be offered for free at launch for a limited period of time.
While a growing portion of the world’s population now has access to the advantages of smart home devices that enable them to turn on the lights, listen to music, and more with their voice, millions of people who live with speech that is hard to understand often cannot use their own voices to utilise such widespread speech technology.
Now, these individuals can reclaim their independence with Voiceitt’s “life-changing” voice recognition technology. According to the company, the launch of the app comes at an important time where people have been social distancing and potentially cut off from vital care support, such as from carers or families.
By initially offering its app at no cost, Voiceitt aims to mitigate some of the hardships created by the pandemic and improve the quality of life for as many people affected as possible.
“Everyone deserves to be able to express themselves and to be understood,” said Danny Weissberg, Voiceitt CEO and Co-founder. “With this launch, countless people with non-standard speech will be able to use their own voice to easily communicate with caregivers, loved ones and even their smart home devices. I’m so proud to make our technology available to this wonderful community. Voice recognition technology is finally becoming accessible to everyone.”
Voiceitt’s app integrates with Amazon’s Alexa to increase independence and quality of life for individuals with speech and motor disabilities.
The Voiceitt experience begins with a simple training phase, allowing the software to better recognise an individual’s speech. After the user repeats a set of words and phrases several times, the Voiceitt app builds an artificial intelligence-powered speech model that allows the individual to communicate specific commands.
Voiceitt’s proprietary automatic speech recognition engine – which combines machine learning with state-of-the-art speech analysis technology – can recognise atypical speech, utterances, cadence of speech, breathing pauses and non-verbal sounds, in any language.
App users can build a personalised dictionary and train the app to recognise their unique pronunciation, a process which takes no more than five minutes on average per phrase. The app then recognises a user’s trained phrases in real-time and translates output into typical speech – enabling users to convey complex sentences that help them better navigate their daily lives.
The assistive app was named a CES® 2021 Innovation Awards Honouree earlier this year.