May marked the start of our second year working on the Nuvoic Project, our collaboration with developer Voiceitt, which aims to improve access to voice recognition technologies for people who have dysarthric speech. Voiceitt’s app supports people who want to communicate or control Smart Home technologies using their own voice, but who are often misunderstood by unfamiliar people or mainstream speech recognition. The Karten Network is leading on user involvement and testing in the UK and Ireland.

Updates

In April we were delighted to welcome our newest Technologist, Geena Vabulas, to the Nuvoic Project Team. Geena joins us part-time, bringing fantastic experience from her role as Policy Manager for Assistive Technology at Policy Connect, as well as previous experience in qualitative research and provision of support and training in assistive technology. Welcome Geena!

We’ve continued to work with Karten Centres and other organisations to recruit participants, and now have 46 people enrolled! Since our last update we’re pleased to welcome new participants from Caritas St. Joseph’s, Enable Ireland, FitzRoy, Oakley College and Portland College, as well as three new individuals who’ve joined us directly. They join those already involved individually or through Beaumont College, Cedar Foundation, The Grange Centre, Homefield College, Leonard Cheshire, National Star, New Bridge Horizons, SeeAbility, St John’s College and Young Epilepsy.

Testing is going well. We ask participants to choose useful phrases and smart home commands, train the app to recognise their spoken prompts and practise using them, then tell us what they think, including any problems or ideas for improvement. The Alexa and other Smart Home controls are really popular, especially to play music or radio. All users can access favourite artists or genres via Amazon music or Spotify and those with paid accounts can setup commands to access their personal playlists. One participant uses Voiceitt to access audiobooks via Audible and we’re working with two others to setup Voiceitt to access their Kindle accounts. Some people use Voiceitt to ask about the news, weather or sports results, or tell jokes. Some are using Voiceitt to control appliances like a lava lamp or fan via a smart plug, others are trying out smart bulbs and experimenting with different colour controls. One participant has an environmental control system to operate his windows and blinds, and through Nuvoic we’re supporting him to control these via Voiceitt. 

We’re getting lots of useful feedback about the app and sharing this with Voiceitt. In May Voiceitt arranged focus groups, including five of our participants, to discuss design ideas for new gaming features like XP points and achievements. These were designed in response to user feedback, to motivate people to train and use the app by making it more fun to use. Several of these new features are now included in the latest update.

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Voiceitt posted a clip of one of our participants, Mark Wilkinson from Leonard Cheshire, using Voiceitt to ask Alexa to tell a joke – and highlighting the fun side of accessibility! Mark also features in the clip used by Voiceitt to mark their launch on the AppStore this month.

Thanks so much to everyone involved for all your work so far on testing Voiceitt, and all your great feedback!

Get in touch!

We would love to hear from you if you, your organisation or someone you know may be interested in taking part, or if you’d like more information. Please email our project co-ordinator: liz@karten-network.org.uk, or you can find more information and get in touch via our project web pages.

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• Featured in the Karten Summer 2021 Newsletter
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