Someone's at last helping AI models understand those with speech disabilities
Boffins at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US are working with the usual internet super-corps to, ideally, improve AI voice recognition for people with disabilities.
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."For many of us, speech and communication are effortless," Clarion Mendes, a clinical professor in speech and hearing science at UIUC working on the project, told"However, there are millions of people for whom communication is not effortless.
Researchers will focus on obtaining diverse audio data from people affected by various medical disorders that impact speech, such as Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , Parkinson's, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome speaking English. 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.
If there are, or have been, projects similar to this effort, that's great, though this one stands out for its support from those making today's AI voice assistants and the like.
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