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Summary
Boffins at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working to improve AI voice recognition for people with disabilities. Volunteers are be paid to record audio samples, which will be used to create a large dataset to train AI models for commercial and research applications. The team will be working with the Davis Phinney Foundation and Team Gleason, two non-profits to gather speech data from people with ALS and Parkinson’s disease at first before expanding to support other types of disabilities.
Show Notes
Speech recognition software often struggles to process speech for people with heavy accents, and performs even worse for people with speech disabilities, since their voices are usually not represented well or at all in training datasets.
The Speech Accessibility Project, launched on Monday and supported by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as nonprofit organizations, aims to make speech recognition models more effective for everyone.
By unifying our efforts toward a common goal of improving speech accessibility for individuals with speech disabilities or differences, we’re not just improving technology – we’re improving quality of life and promoting independence.”
Volunteers will be paid to record audio samples, which will be used to create a large dataset to train AI models for commercial and research applications.
Industry partners supporting the Speech Accessibility Project are funding the project for two years at least, and will work with academics to figure out how current speech recognition models can be improved.
Source
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/ai_language_recognition_disabled/
