INNOVATIONS IN COMMUNICATIONS

In the present day

Christina Holtzen

TexT To speech recognITon

Acapela Box
The leading voice expert leaning upon 25 years of experience, invents text-to- speech solutions to give your content a voice in up to 30 languages. Their speech solutions allow you to turn any written text into natural speech files, using any of the 60 High Quality standard voices or your own synthesized voice talent.

speech recognITIon

From VoiceOver to Siri

One of the big differences is that VoiceOver was touted as an accessibility feature, meaning it was mostly used by the visually impaired and people who cant easily operate iPhones (Parkinsons disease patients, for example), while Siri is meant for the mass market.

LIpreadIng and TechnoLogy

Silent Communication
A device which allows people to have phone conversations without actually speaking anything out loud. The system requires people to simply move their mouths without speaking, thus creating a voiceless interaction between cell phone users.

Lipreading and technoLogy contd

Utilizing nine electrodes stuck to the users face, the prototype detects the electrical potentials from the muscles that move during speech. The electromyographic pulses are amplified and sent wirelessly to a laptop, which then translates the signals into a synthesized speaking voice.

Advantages:
The prototype device could allow people to conduct silent phone conversations Could be used as a technique for communicating in noisy environments Could be initially used to help people who have lost their voice due to illness or accident

nauTuraL user InTeracTIon & kInecT

Microsofts Kinect
Kinect 2 will be powerful enough to lip read, detect when gamers are angry and even determine which direction they are facing. Kinect 2 is also expected to support the tracking of pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to better measure their emotions.

nauturaL user interaction & kinect contd

Advantages:
So Kinect can better interpret your words from across the room, or in a loud environment. You wont have to turn the music down to search and navigate the web on your TV or tablet Where the user is unable to speak or uses ASL, Kinect will use its sign language recognition system

reVIsed ThesIs
This thesis presents the hypothesis that lip reading technologies provide hearing impaired individuals a way to achieve connectedness to the world. Without the aid of technology, traditional lipreading can become inaccurate thus creating misconstrued messages. There are several variations of how individuals articulate their speech which pose many obstacles when attempting to lip read. Some examples include: mumbling, different languages, speed of speech, and lack of facial emotions. Additionally, obstruction of view of the speakers lips (e.g. facial hair, hands in front of mouth, cultural differences, back turned) or when multiple people are talking in quick succession, also prove to be difficult scenarios for hard of hearing individuals. Such research could contribute to new technologies and design techniques for hearing impaired and deaf individuals to be able to lip read more successfully.