Big tech will advance voice recognition for people with disabilities
IT giants teamed up with the University of Illinois for the cause of speech accessibility
The big tech gang consisting of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft has teamed up with a row of nonprofits and the University of Illinois (UIUC) on the Speech Accessibility Project.
The purpose of this initiative is to improve voice recognition for communities with disabilities and diverse speech patterns often not considered by AI algorithms.
The first step towards this aim is collecting a database of people with disabilities like Parkinson’s. The Speech Accessibility Project will collect a variety of speech samples from people who share the same condition, thus creating the most overarching voice recognition directory.
With the funding provided by the companies, the UIUC will recruit paid volunteers to contribute voice samples and help create a ‘private, de-identified’ dataset that can be used to train machine learning models. The initiative will first cover the English-speaking market.
It has also earned widespread support from groups, such as The Davis Phinney Foundation (Parkinson’s) and Team Gleason (Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS).
