As we move into our third and final year of the Nuvoic Project, we’re seeing some great feedback from participants with atypical speech about the different ways they’ve been using the Voiceitt speech recognition app, and ideas on how it could be improved. Voiceitt have already implemented some of these ideas and are working on others. In this update, we also have a blog from Haroon Sahir, one of our participants from St Joseph’s in London, about his experience of taking part.
Feedback from users
Over 70 people with atypical speech have now joined the project and shared feedback about using the Voiceitt app to communicate or control Smart Home technology like Alexa, including the following comments:
It’s got easier as it learns my voice
It felt good, it was the first time a speech recognition app understood me
The recognition seems to work much better the more I use it
When it’s noisy it doesn’t work as well and I usually have to repeat a few times
It makes it easier to do some things for myself
It helps me when I want to go out to places and communicate with new people
Symbols for every phrase would be useful
It could be incredibly useful if the recognition works better
The Voiceitt team have used participants’ feedback to improve the app, including making it quicker and easier to train new phrases and adding points and achievements to make it more fun! Most people would like the app to understand their speech without having to train each phrase in advance, and we now have 21 participants donating speech data through Project Ensemble to help with this.
Ensemble
In the latest phase of our project, we’re asking people with atypical speech to record and donate phrases through the Ensemble website, to help Voiceitt improve the way their speech recognition technology works. Thanks to everyone who’s enrolled so far. Between them, they’ve donated over 7,000 recordings so far – a brilliant start!
We’re keen to include as many non-standard voices as possible so please get in touch if you or people you support want to add theirs to the Ensemble! We can offer equipment on loan, technical support, gift cards of up to £100 for participants and funding for organisations supporting someone to take part. If you or your organisation would like to be involved in this exciting development work, please see our web pages or contact our project co-ordinator: liz@karten-network.org.uk for more information.
Other Updates
One of our participants, Haroon Sahir, has written the following piece about his experience of the project, testing the Voiceitt app and donating speech recordings through Voiceitt Ensemble:
It was just about the end of Lockdown when my main carer Leanne came back from her Covid-19 break. Before this I was just having three hours care a week during the ‘dark days of London Lockdown.’ When Leanne returned we were having telephone conversations with staff from the St Joseph’s centre in Hendon, London. We were trying to figure out on how to install Microsoft Teams onto my decade-old adapted I.T. equipment because nearly everyone was doing Zoom calls on their computers, mobiles or iPads and I wasn’t able to do this during lockdowns!’ Staff asked, after they noticed I was having speech impairment problems over the telephone, if I would be interested in taking part in a speech project. I said ‘yes’ and this led to the introduction to Geena, a technologist on the project, via e-mail.
We carried on by using the trusted and my best form of communication, which is email! There were lots of email exchanges between Geena from the Karten Network, St Joseph’s and me before I first met Geena with support from Leanne, travelling by London public bus to the St Joseph centre. That was start of the Voiceitt project for me. We did Zoom calls using Leanne’s mobile, using iPads to do my voice recordings, and Leanne videoed me using my speech recordings on the iPad in the gym and at the centre. During Geena’s home visits we set up my computer with Zoom and a microphone and she interviewed me and videoed me doing the Voiceitt recordings on my computer. Geena is coming again to try to set up our old 37″ TV in my bedroom, so I don’t have to use the awkward old Toshiba television remote control!
The most valuable and interesting thing about working on the Voiceitt project I did some 1729 Voiceitt recordings for Voiceitt Ensemble. When recording on Ensemble I felt I was working on my fourth unofficial internet job and more importantly in my opinion I was doing speech therapy independently without the help from a human speech therapist. In the future Voiceitt could be used as a science fiction version to speech therapy?
The interesting or funny thing was when I was doing the Voiceitt recordings at several night times my 77 year old mother came from her bedroom into my bedroom to see why I was talking to myself! Eventually Voiceitt Ensemble said “It has run out of sentences to record in this dataset”! I was the first person to complete all the phrases. I missed doing the recordings and hearing my speech back through the speaker/microphone which was one of the gadgets provided by the Voiceitt project and ordered by Geena via the internet!
After this was written, the team released new sentences and Haroon has been busy recording again! You can also check out Haroon’s sports writing on Facebook. Many thanks to Haroon for his blog and his fantastic work on the project.
Get in touch!
We would love to hear from you if you, or someone you know may be interested in taking part in testing the Voiceitt app and/or donating speech samples. 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 2022 Newsletter
- This article is listed in the following subject areas: Nuvoic Project