Google's Project Relate App Aims to Make it Easier for People With Speech Impairment to Communicate

Google is currently looking for help in developing an Android app that is aimed at giving people with speech impairments more options to communicate.

Google's Project Relate

The app is called Project Relate, and it is meant to give voice transcription and synthesis that could make it easier for users to be understood, according to TechCrunch.

The app is descended from Project Euphonia, which was announced in 2019. Google later then published some of its research for Project Euphonia.

The effort was led by Dimitri Kanevsky, Google's research scientist,w ho has impaired speech. She brought firsthand knowledge to the solution that is based on artificial intelligence.

Now, one of the main partners of Project Relate and the users of the app is Aubrie Lee, who is on the marketing team and also has an impaired speech caused by muscular dystrophy, thus she has trouble being understood by both other people and other apps.

The fact is that speech recognition engines need a lot of recorded speech in order to learn how to interpret it correctly, and that the data is biased in favor of common speech patterns, according to Engadget.

Those who have heavy accents are not represented in these data sets, which means they are not understood too.

Those who have speech impairments are also not included, so it is difficult for them to use voice-powered devices that are commonly used.

A lot of companies that create this technology are making improvements to the system in order to understand languages with heavy accents, according to The Verge.

However, in order to collect and analyze individualized speech patterns of people with speech impairments and other disabilities take a different type of effort.

Every voice is different, however, uncommon and unique patterns like those that are resulting from a stroke or injury can be very difficult for a machine learning system to understand reliably.

Google's Voice Transcription

Project Relate is a better voice transcription tool for those who have speech impairments. It has a "Listen" option that turns the speech of the user into text, so it can be posted elsewhere or it can be read by other people.

The "Repeat" option listens to the voice first then repeats what was just said that is clearer. The "Assistant" option helps forward the transcribed speech to Google Assistant so users can do common tasks like asking about certain topics or playing music.

To activate those capabilities, the work at Google has been first to collect data, and to that end, the researchers stated that Google have created a database of more than a million speech samples made by volunteers.

This was used to train up what is called the base level of intelligence for the speech-recognition AI. However, just like any other ML system, the more data, the more specific the data is to the people who use it, making it more helpful.

The company is recruiting a couple of real-world testers that can use the app regularly. The volunteers will be asked to record a couple of phrases and the phrases will be integrated with Google's speech model so that they can cater to the system's speech patterns.

If you believe that this could be helpful in your daily life, you can sign up as a potential volunteer and you can help shape the app that can be used by everyone.

In 2016, Google launched new tools for visually, hearing and motor impaired users.

In September, an Android app was also launched to help those with speech impairment and motor impairment.

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Written by Sophie Webster