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Cell Phones for the Deaf
nitzan writes "Quoting from the article: 'the software translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer, whose lips move in real time synch with the voice allowing the receiver to lip read.' Unfortunately this only works with laptops, but a pda version is in the works." The company website has a demonstration.
Still no?
Ok, can you hear me now? Still no?
Ok....
...so now we'll all have to learn how to sign "Turn off your fucking phone, asshole!"
What was wrong with speech to text?
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
I worked with deaf people for a while and they were (and I am sure still are) disappointed that cell phones are not compatible with TTY devices. How difficult is this to do?
Heh, nice for the impaired, good thing there is allways people developing things like this. Tho this one must be expensive but does the impaired ones care as in many countries the gov. pays for the aiding stuff like this, wheel chairs etc... My friend is impaired and gov pays nearly everything, in some small things he must pay his own part.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Voltron was doing stuff like this in 1984. He's sweet and awesome.
No downloadable ring-tones.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Why in the world do they bother with the lip-sync, and just use real time text-banner style. Gotta wonder about over-engineering sometimes.
That's probably the most frightening anthropomorphic mouth I've ever seen animated!
.
Amaxzingly enough, the deaf can drive. I live near a technical deaf school, and quite a few drive. I just hope they don't try to use this cell ohone and drive at teh same time.
Sure, they'll be able to "hear" you, but how will you hear them? Seems like this company has only half the equation here. Also, not that I'm a lip reader, but those demos were very erratic for me to lip read.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
This has to be the most assinine attempt at a first post I've ever seen. It would most likely be helpful to the disabled community in an article entitled "Cell Phones for the Deaf"?? Come up with something more original, PLEASE.
If it is anything like the demo they have on their site, this technology is doomed.
I hope to God they are not using Flash to deliver this product.
Uhhgg!
why dont you just translate it into words ... reading words is probly easier than lip reading
This just seems complicated, why can't they just improve the speech to text capability. It seems like drawing a face with life-like facial movements to enable lip reading is a little beyond the scope of power for a PDA.
This is a fantastic idea which will enable communication for the vast numbers of hearing impaired, however if the web-site is any indication, the technology needs improvement. I'm pretty good at reading lips and I was working pretty hard to figure out what was being said with the sound off.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Now the fascist US government cant monitor all the cell phone activity with the receiving end... deaf people will be recruted to attack key positions...
...before some deaf guy sues a cell phone maker for discrimination because those of us who can hear have a huge selection of ringtones to choose from, while the deaf can only use vibrate mode?
Will cell phone makers have to make phones that 'hum' the ringtones via vibration?
Being a severely hearing impaired person, I do find the virtual person's "O"'s to be highly disturbing if not graphic. Yikes.
Damn, you beat me to it.
She could call her bank to find the nearest drive through ATM with Braille!
Oh wait, she'd still need to see the cell phone. Never mind. I guess its a good thing she isn't still here.
Can you pick up some Olive Juice while you are at the store?
What, I love you too man!
I'm just wondering what the face will look like... I'm just hoping that it looks like Max Headroom... I'd get on if that was the case!
-Magiluke
Glad to hear that the deaf will finally be able to use mobile communications. If they have to look at a screen while they're using it, people had better not use these while driving...
Somewhat reminiscent of the blind driving project:
http://www.rallyracingnews.com/blinddrv.html
I
Presumably this technology does
speech->text->animated model
Wouldn't it be simpler to present the text to the user? I would have thought text->human is much higher bandwidth than animated-model->human.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
what?
I lived with a deaf room-mate last year. It took me about 2 months for me to understand what he was saying, and took him about the same to get used to my lips. Anytime he meets someone new, its very hard for him to read their lips (i.e. every time a new telemarketer tries to prey on the deaf user). Also, its not just the lips, its the tounge also. It'd probably be easier to use speach-> text software than this stuff....and what about background noise? I doubt this thing works well if not at all.
is a prgm tht trnslts txt msgs in 2 rdbl txt
More seriously though, I couldn't figure out what she was saying... I don't claim to be a lip-reading expert, but I can make out maybe 60% of what people are saying on TV while muted.
Anybody care to smack me with a cluestick?
I sure as hell couldn't tell you what they were saying, even when I knew what words were coming out of their mouth. And this is not to mention cell phone static, distractions, contractions, mumbling, and lots of "ummm" and "uhhhh" that occurs during normal speech. I really don't see how this is a viable communication method.
Maybe it's because I'm not experienced with lip reading. Maybe people who are deaf are better at it than I am, but I can usually tell what Football coaches are saying on the sidelines of games (of course, that's limited to "Bull****" and "You've gotta be ****ing kidding me!", but still...)
First of all, I have to say this is a great idea. Just because you are deaf doesn't mean you can't use a cellphone. I have a cousin who is deaf. The last I talked to her, she was using sign lang. She was not reading lips (atleast I don't think). I personally don't know how to read lips. So, is this really going to take off?
I thought thats what SMS was for?
Is it my imagination, or does their logo bear a striking resemblance to NVIDIA's?
now deaf people can get brain cancer too...
I'm confused.
I still cnat get coverage, or hear the other person clearly, why should the deaf be different? But i can ply 3 different games and send a fucking picture of a duck. Stupid phone companies. Its a fucking phone!! First, fix it so i can hear someone, THEN gimme the damn bowling games.
OK, this might be a troll. Im not sure myself. Its definately a vent. Fucking sprint. Oh well.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I just can not picture myself on a bus looking at this wildly articulate mout while yelling back: "Can yoo reepeeet dat agaannn???" Yes, I am hearing impaired. I would NEVER touch this thing. I'll stick with 2 way messaging.
look at a lip reader and say:
'I want a fig newton'
IMHO:
too many flaws, the investors will back out
pretzel_logic
Somehow I don't think that a 5 fps animated mouth is going to catch on as a major tool for the hearing impared.
"Sure looked good on paper...."
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
You have a choice between several celebrities' faces.
:)
Or you could mix n match your own.
What's this Submit thingy do?
its mobile phones. jeez, why doe the usa create their own word for EVERYTHING.
And now I can show her my 'O' face.. you know.. my 'OOoo' face.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Accurate lip reading is a lot more difficult than sign language. SpeechView would have a much more usable product if they animated signing hands instead of a speaking face. I guess the software would be more complicated since it would involve speech recognition instead of just sound mimicry.
Write Santa and ask him for a CLUE FOR CHRISTMAS!
Asshole...
So this software translates speech to text, parses the text, and then outputs an animated face which renders the text into mouth positions? Hm... how about skipping the stupid naked chick phase and just output the text directly?
I think this would be much better suited to creating animated films instead of enabling the deaf to see a crappy rendition of mouth movements. I'd bet this technology was taken directly from digital animation software companies and hacked to fit this application.
Of course, all this just begs the question: does it show a puckered asshole flapping if you make a farting noise into the phone?
Can you see my lips now? Good!
Developers are nearing a major breakthrough in 5.1 Surround Spacial Narrative Vision(TM). This amazing new technology targeted towards blind people immerses the blind viewer in an immersive field which narrates the scenery as an overlay of the movie soundtrack.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
Don't you mean:
....halfway decent than.
I agree with this post.
Someone can say "Pot" and yet with the same lip movement, can also say "My". Men with bushy mustaches are a lip-reading disaster.
For me, I've adapted in my own way: I rely heavily on my hearing aids. That combination of both lip-reading and hearing the audio stream from your mouth enables me to achieve at least a 70% success rate (under ideal conditions, if it's a party atomosphere, fudgeddaboutit). I've had hearing aids since I was 1 1/2, and only with extensive speech therapy can I speak well. I'm one of the few deaf-from-birth people that can do it this well. So, from that perspective, I can speak on a phone (as long as I can understand that mangled audio coming out the receiver, which is 0%).
Why don't they just focus on speech recognition? A great speech recognition phone would enable deaf people that speak to use phones for near real-time conversations. In addition, such technology can also be (easily?) adapted to foreign language translators for tourists.
However, until such technology is available at the consumer level, I'm stuck with two-way text messaging devices like the T-Mobile SideKick.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
I thought it seemed a little weird at first, but then I checked out the other demos. When I knew what the words were ("Thank you" in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese), I could easily tell what was being said.
I notice a lot of people complaining about improving text-to-speech, which is far more advanced than this technology. Speech sounds come out in a continuous flow. Getting a computer to recognize the breaks between words, properly spell them reliably, etc. is hard enough on a desktop system, much less a PDA. Especially considering in languages like English, where most vowels in unstressed syllables are rendered vocally as "uh".
This system simply has to hear a sound, and immediately display an associated... well, not "grapheme", since this isn't writing... maybe "pixeme". It is the graphical equivalent of attempting to spell perfectly phonetically.
Also, if you didn't notice it, "invisible" sounds that occur on the back of the tongue are indicated by circles on the cheeks (like hard 'g' and 'k'), and nasal sounds are indicated by a darkening of the nose.
All in all, I think this is an interesting idea. It will be even cooler when they can render different faces so the "avatar" resembles the person to whom you're speaking.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Partly, because speech to text isn't very good.
Speech to text isn't very good because its very hard to turn phonetics into words. Our ability to understand people is very reliant on context. Knowing what's been said helps you understand what's being said.
Some will say that speech to text is getting fairly good in English, which is somewhat true. Obviously, though, there are bigger markets in other languages.
So how does this thing work, if it doesn't do speech to text? It does speech to phonetics, and phonetics to lips.
For example, its relatively easy to understand when someone has said "h -ee- r", but knowing if that's supposed to be "here" or "hear" is quite difficult.
This is why the same software works across languages. "Th" is "Th" in any language, and your single algorithm doesn't have to care.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Slashdot reports trivial news about wireless while the
Cheney-Rumsfeld Dictatorship plots to enslave U.S. residents as it broadens
its Meta-Wars Against Countries
That Opposes U.S. Business Interests
Put that in your bong and inhale!
Be Patriotic: Smoke Amerikan Grown Marijuana.
Cheers,
Woot
They already have songs for the deaf, and it's apparently a big seller .....
Finally, someone takes those elitist deaf people down a notch.
The only people who would benefit from this are people who are deaf AND illiterate.
If I were deaf I'd prefer it to simply display text on a screen the size of a pda.
What benefit does watching lips move have over reading plain text?
- Tempestdata
This is clearly a solution for the large population of completely illiterate deaf people, for whom speech-to-text is not an option.
The mobile phone is death!
Can you hear me now? Good!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Just turn on the vibrating feature. Then you can call your deaf girlfriend and say "I just called to say I love you" in morse code...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Cell phones for the deaf? What?
Hansel USA - Chut up and read!
i'm curious to see how this thing handles glitches, and moments where the compression gets so heavy and watery you might as well be listening to recent autechre albums. will the mouth appear to be hissing? will the face collapse into pablo picasso-esque abstract forms?
(To be honest, though, i'm mostly curious about this because of an overwhelming desire i have at this exact moment to find a deaf person with one of these cellphones, call him up, and play an autechre album into the phone.)
I have my ASL(American Sign Language) class in an hour. I'm going to ask my teacher what he thinks about this. He already carries around a 2 way message device and I wonder what he thinks about switching to something like this. I'll post back his response.
... if you have this software running on a phone then if you are hearing impared you could get real time conversation with the other party without having to go through a human being.
I've spoken with a hearing impared person on a phone before through a TTY system and it is painfully slow. First you have to say your sentence and then they send it. Then the other end needs to read it, type in a response, and then send it at which point it is read back to you. Imagine having a conversation over an Instant Messenger except you're secretary was reading the screen and typing for you. (IM for the blind for example)
I agree that we need better voice to text and text to voice translation. That technology would give use better access for everyone. You could have "hearing" for the hearing impared (speech to text), "reading" for the vision impaired (text to speech), and you could even have "writing" for those with fine muscle control imparement or who are lacking the necessary limbs for various reasons.
But this is an interesting approach to solve one of the three problems.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I'm not deaf, but my parents are. Everything you said about the deaf driving is 100% correct. My parents are in their 70s, and my only mom was in two accidents in her life, none her fault. One guy rear-ended her at a stop sign, and another ran a red light & hit her broadside. Hearing was a non-issue in both cases.
David Stork has a chapter computer lip reading on in the book "Hal's Legacy" on A.I. methods. The combination is much more reliable that either audio or visual.
Thats all we need deaf people usinga cell phone while their driving.
"As far as I can see, speech-to-text would be a lot bigger (space-wise), as well as *way* more processor intensive. And slower and less accurate."
How well do you actualy see? The software would require the speach to be converted into some form of phonetics before it could determine mouth position. And if it can be converted to phoenetics it's just as easy to convert to text.
The only possible reason I can see for this is if the software isn't really that accurate and so ti can get away with fudging the phonetics just a bit and/or the software was designed not so much for the pure deaf, but for those with some audio preception and the visuals of the mouth help them to better understand the audio.
in england, we call them mobile phones, and we actually use a system compatible with 160 countries, and we actually have COMPETITION with providers.
How does this work? How do you alert the deaf person of an incoming call?
So close, but yet so far. Give us this plus this. That is, a portable chordal handset with braille output. Then connect it to either a blackberry like device, or one of those AIM cellphones.
Can you imagine? I walk to work every day with my phone logged into AIM. I chat with people while I walk. I try not to step in potholes. The convenience of chatting and holding the cellphone at my side while waiting for the vibrating alert set me to thinking...
Iduno. Y'all want a portable SSH client that you don't have to look at in order to use? Without the requirement for a screen, I don't care how big the device is. It goes in my backpack. The input/output is all tactile.
I wonder how hard it is for sighted folks to learn braille. I wonder how hard it would be to mount braille-like output on a small handheld device. Dunno if that's possible, really.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
That's not a computer generated lip synch demo.
It merely an old millie vanillie video.
Better hope the RIAA doesn't find out.
I'm thinking about taking that new chick from Logistics. If things go right I might be showing her my O-face. You know: Oh! Oh!
Maybe so, but it's marked off-topic. Apparently, nobody's watched the movie.
It is a huge misconception that the deaf can read lips, when only 30% of what is said is visible on the lips, the rest has to be guessed. Now imagine them trying to decifer the text on "Virtual" lips.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Simple. There's not a million dollor market in making cell phones for the deaf. It's the sad truth. They don't really care about minority consumers.
That would be less error prone.
At least I assumed that the folks speaking at 95 db into a highly compressed mic did so because they were deaf and unable to hear themselves.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Wouldn't it be much easier just to have a voice to text conversion on the cell phone, instead of developing some fancy animated emoticons?
That's fine for the deaf person, but how do they communicate back? Does the phone convert from mouth movements to audio?
I don't think Trolling Stones was belittling your cell phone infrastructure. He was merely pointing out that you drive on the other (wrong) side of the street. Plus you boil your food and don't brush your teeth, wanker.
In Soviet Russia, a post replies to you.
Nothing, that's what! Contrary to many of these other posts, speech to text is a much better solution.
People seem to be forgetting that speech to text is the back-end for this lip service anyway. In order for it to work, speach is interpreted by a computer which then maps the interpreted speech to canned lip movements. The canned lip movements require cpu horsepower to drive the graphics and they need a large screen for it to be readable. These two reasons are why it is only available on a laptop.
With the speech to text scenario; speech is interpreted by a computer and is matched to canned pieces of text. So far, pretty much the same. But, now the text is output to just about any screen, including the text screens of today's cell phones.
Basically the speech to text would be an automated TTY/TDD system. TTY/TDD has been in use and has proven highly effective for decades.
To answer your question, there is NOTHING wrong with speech to text. However, you won't draw too many VCs with it. Now, put a computerized talking head on it and extoll the greatness of its virtues and you may well be able to sucker in a few VCs. And afterall, isn't that what it's all about?
Hmmm, so if you wanted to talk to someone on the phone with a deaf person, you could do what Jerry and George did here, and cover your mouths with tissues, etc while you talk.
All of life's puzzles can be solved by Seinfeld...
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I go to karaoke every week, and lately i've been making my own karaoke VCD's of more modern songs.
t ry 1.avi
I decided to do La La land by green velvet one week and just for kicks I thought I would make a talking head ala max headroom.
http://www.zeromag.com/images/downloads/videos/
(Divx compressed BTW 6 megs)
Basically I just recorded a second track of my singing without the music, then pumped the wav through the facial animator in truespace 6.
What I found was it actually made it a bit easier for me to keep up with the words because I would watch how the lips on my on screen persona and mimic them myself.
Anyways, enjoy folks.
Speech-to-text works fine for the deaf person "listening" to the phone. But what does the deaf person do when he/she needs to "talk"?
... and then the speech part is pretty redundant.
I know I'm generalizing, and not to be politically uncorrect, but don't most deaf people have difficulty speaking "clearly"? So how does the phone deal with that? Or does the deaf user need to type in their response?
It seems to me that speech-to-text for receiving and text-to-speech for sending is the way to go
In which case you've just re-invented the Blackberry.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Reading this makes me realize that my Lightbulbs for the Blind scheme was not crazy! Bundles of cash, here I come!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Members of the Deaf community are huge on SMS. It was a revolution for the whole scene. I reakon a better solution would be to give them easier ways to enter SMS messages quickly without needing a PDA. dont know how but it wouls still need to be small. HI people ?
You know, every other living thing on this planet kill or leave their wounded or diabled members behind...
No really now. Why not invest the money they spent here developing research to actual electronic ears, ect. Research a cure not a way qround the problem.
You don't cut off the penis to slow the spread of aids do you?
I bet this project was thought up by a bunch of project managers that got together in a think-tank and decided that this was the most shiny thing that would exist. Forget functionality, does it sound/look cool? Lets do that!
"No, no... I said V-A-C-U-U-M!"
You have the I.Q. of a lemming on crack.
slashdot!=valid HTML
I am developing a system that converts the audio into lips, reads the lips into text, then converts the text into concrete ideas, then does a lookup to convert the ideas into pictures.
The result is that the deaf person sees pictures of what the other person is talking about. For example, if they say "I'll meet you at the bus stop" they will see a picture of some meat, then the letter U, then a PCI bus, then a stop sign.
The next step is a version for the blind, who cannot use cell phones since they have trouble dialing. It will interpret sentences into a techno song that conveys the meaning.
Can the phone convert voice to morse code and vibrate the dashes and dots?
How about we skip the whole idea of text output? This is stupid! It's a complete waste of technology and time. Translating one person's audio into a 3d modeled face. Brilliant ...
... what the crap.
How about they just use a video phone? Or have the audio be displayed in a text output? It has to go through that step anyway.
3D modeled face
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
With the accuracy of speech-to-text these days, the margin of error you get reading those lips might very well be smaller than if a computer tries to make those sounds into words and sentences.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
> Presumably this technology does
> speech->text->animated model
No, actually it does
speech->sounds->animated model
It's actually easier to convert speech sounds into mouth movements than to text because phonemes in English aren't always typed the same way.
For example, the sound "neighbor" could be interpreted by the software as the text "nayber"..figuring out the correct spelling of the phonemes the software hears is complicated and depends on context.
However, every non-vowel sound corresponds to one mouth movement (and every vowel sound could be easily converted into a color or something like that). This is why it's so much easier to convert speech into lip movements than to text (and also why the software isn't language dependent--say "bluggamachooga", and it'll analyze each phoneme and convert it into a lip movement).
just slap the fuck so hard they begin to hear again - repeat as necessary...
Yes... yes... yes... but how do you know when it's ringing?
wouldn't it be a lot more practical to just dump it to text???
SMS
Posting late, but wtf.
By way of introduction: I developed the core coarticulation and other algorithms for lip synching when I worked at a now-defunct company called...wait for it...LIPSinc. We thought the resulting lip synching was pretty damn convincing, so on my own I tested out our stuff with a hearing-impaired friend, with mixed results. Anyway, I don't know a little about this stuff, I know a *lot* about it.
What these guys have done is map phonemes onto exaggerated visemes (the pictures of the mouth). Not a bad idea at all! Bunch of problems, though. First, there's a data data reduction of about 3x in going from sound to video--there are 40-50 distinguishable phonemes, and 9-16 distinguishable visemes, depending on how you count each. This is because the visible part of the face only makes up the end of the vocal tract, a lot of distinctions between letters occurs without the involvement of the lips, like the difference between F and V, while others, like K, can be pronounced with the face in virtually any position. This is part of what makes lip reading so hard with a real person, and why they need a lot of context to pull it off. They also seem to be slowing down the timing, as if they recognized the phonemes and then synthesized each at the same length. This gives longer to recognize each one, but wrecks the visual prosody (rhthym) of the speech, which is a good cue for where the parts of speech are. Then there's the rest of the face. The eyebrows and head positions help you figure out key words, ends of clauses, tell if something is a question, etc.
Those who say that TTS is superior to lip reading have a point. Good TTS contains *more* accurate information than an uninterpreted stream of phonemes (itself 3x richer than a stream of visemes, as I said above), because the machine can do a Viterbi search to find the most likely sequence of words from a continuous stream of phonemes. Words also open up higher NLP functions, so you can do constraint relaxation to test whether "wreck a nice beach" or "recognize speech" fits better in the context.
Still, I'd like to see an experiment where the raw phonemes are fed, as text, to the recipient. I think with practice, your brain would start to decode the string (it manages with the sound, right?), despite the lack of word boundaries and the errors in phoneme detection (which is not all that high without text-I think seventy-something percent). Seems like an easier pattern recognition problem than lip reading. Who wants to go get funding?
Now there are going to be BLIND drivers swerving all over the road because the're talking on the phone!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I go to the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. We host the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). Guess what? Most deaf people can't read lips any better than hearing people. It takes a lot of extra bandwith and resources to record and play video, then say, (1) translate speech to text, or (2) translate text to speech. Ultimately this is only an advantage for two deaf people, both able to read lips, talking over a phone.
Deaf people are USELESS. They don't need phones, they need to be shot and their body parts should be harvested for more viable members of society.
This is actually a pretty neat technology.
:)
Ive seen lots of suggestions for speech to text, but if you have had any experence with regular powerful PCs and speech->text you will see why that wont work on even a 2ghz intel system, let alone a pda/cel phone.
(Didnt we just have an ask slashdot about this?)
A wire frame of a face only requires slightly more CPU power than processing a WinAmp visual (No 32 bit color eyecandy here) and i have actually seen a visualization plugin (For ge-force, avail for winamp and itunes as well as some opensource packages) that has a module that draws a face and it in a way moves with the sound.
Granted that was not its design, it was made to look good, but obviously with a few changes it could be made to acuratly simulate a face and mouth for this very purpose.
Im all for any technology that makes interacting with a computer easier. While I personally would prefer direct sound into my ears over this, I also concider myself lucky to have that ability compared to those that dont.
Personally Im all for the direct brain connection, but i have a feeling thats a ways off yet
Working in a call center, i get the occasional deaf call.
It takes tremendous amounts of time, because not only does the translator have to interpret what the customer is saying, so that i can hear it, he then has to translate what i say back to the customer. It takes ages, and i'd imagine that with a cell phone, having a comptuer immediately translate, if slightly less accurate, would be preferable to having a human slowly (compared to the comptuer) enter it. Speed Vs Ease of Comprehension. Pretty common comparison. To each their own
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Consensus is that only about 30-40% of spoken English is comprehendible only through lipreading.
such as a Cheney-Rumsfeld approved "smallpox"
vaccine.
Then see who needs lithium.
Thanks in advance,
Woot
My wife is hearing impaired, so we've got a lot of HI and deaf friends. Nearly all of them use Motorola T900 two-way pagers. Even the older, less tech-savy deaf people are comfortable with them, since it's not that different from a TTY (albeit non-interactive). They're small, handy, inexpensive, and run for quite a while on an AA battery. They're email-able so they have no problems communicating with hearing people (especially if you've got a email-capable cell phone).
The only problem is the non-interactive nature, and the fact that the email messages have to be rather small. If someone would come up with a version that could do real unit-to-unit TTY (essentially put a phone/TTY in it) in addition to email, they would sweep the market.
All this flashy lip-reading-speech-recognition crap is trying to kill a cockroach with a hand grenade.
It's called SMS!! Works for even the non-deaf crowd and doesn't piss as many people off.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Every GSM phone made has for years come equipped with SMS capabilities.
SMS is very popular with the deaf (at least where I come from). It allows them to communicate just as easily with those with good hearing as other deaf people.
SMS also solves the problem of being globally accepted (just as long as you're not on the North-Western side of the Atlantic pond), and you don't need a special kind of GSM phone to be able to communicate with SMS. Another nice feature is that it works no matter how noisy it is surrounding the sender.
We have tools like Sprint Relay On-Line that will do text-to-speech... and every state provides confidential relay services to begin with. Many states are moving towards making 711 a standard relay number.
If a deaf person wanted a "cell phone", they'll probably have one from Wynd Communications, a two-way pager with text/e-mail and other services built right into the damn thing. They're all the rage here. Screw lip reading over the phone. This technology is pure eye-candy. Nice, but how useful will it really be?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
now we have deaf drivers (can't hear you honk horn) looking at an avatar right in front of them and you can't tell if they're looking at the road or not!
I'm deaf, and I'd know when you were honking the horn, we can feel it.. its stupid people like you who think that the only way you can know there's a horn going off is to hear it.
AND I'm almost willing to bet you're one of those dumbasses who like to dial your cellphone with your phone out in front of you and not paying any attention to the road either..
Now whats the difference between this and that? None! dont use both on the road while driving!
sorry for any offense caused but I wasn't trying to be serious there. Please locate your sense of humor before posting on slashdot (check outside your doorstep, perhaps its there :-) )
TV for the blind? Bicycles for quadrapaligics? Ham radios for the mute? Source code for Windows?
Not noteable, IMO a rubbish article.
Why not display it in text BUT NOT proper nor really English? Use phonetics... the big issue with speech to text is trying to make it into proper English, right? Then screw it, go with phonetical text, no crazy mouth reading.
Now this would work fine, if a speaking person would read the phonetic sounds, it would make sense, however, im not sure if the deaf can...
ummmmmmm what about desktops?
Post-lingually Deaf? I only ask because I have experience with The Deaf, and I must say that you write English like a native Hearie! :)
:)
>I'd know when you were honking the horn, we can feel it
Now, driving a manual transmission by feeling the car's vibrations (no tach.) is one thing; being able to feel even those little tweeter-sounding horns on some smaller vehicles is another...
-=- James.
http://www.deafpilots.com/
and
http://www1.faa.gov/AVR/afs/deaffaq.htm
are two good reference points for seeing how deaf people can fly up there without using a radio, etc. No, they can't fly at LAX, etc. On a related note, I checked out the T-Mobile Sidekick after seeing an ad just now on slashdot saying that CmdrTaco recommends it. I checked it out and it looks exactly like what I've been looking for: email, unlimited web and AIM.. but one caveat... after one year, they start charging $3.50 per megabyte above 15 megabytes/month.. ouch.. i wonder how bad this would be..
bottomline for the idea of cellphone for deaf is full of crapshits! i don't belive in it's usefullness ,only reliable way is email,fax and videochat in asl,yes there is a national video relay service for the deaf!!!!!permiting us to sign in asl
btw asl is not the same as signed english and asl is much simpler
I work for Sprint relay who provides services for people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or speach disabled. After a few days of doing my job (saying what deaf people type and typing what the hearing person says back) I have felt I am simply being paid to emulate a piece of technology that hasn't been invented yet.
I am paid to turn speach into text, and text into speach. I guess real speach to text soft/hard-ware, suitable for real life applications, is still not practical.
I'd also like to add that For Hearing People Only, ISBN 0-934016-1-0 is a great source of information about the complex and interesting world of Deaf people, and the language of ASL.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
Ok, so lets pretend this helps the deaf understand what the person on the other side of the phone is saying ... now how does the deaf person communicate back to the person on the other side? I mean, some deaf people can make noises which represent words to some extent.. but this does not seem to help the majority ...
I think I've heard these. Usually followed by some "turn off that %Q phone!" yells.
Text messaging, anyone? ;-)
Commenting on: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=5 81&e=3&cid=581&u=/nm/20021126/tc_nm/telecoms_israe l_cellcom_dc
s age/587 where I said:
g e/1 ,
...TTY devices, which cost as little as $150 or as much as $700 for a portable model... [which have been] used since the 1960's to transmit and receive text messages over phone lines...
u s/
"Israeli Software Enables Deaf to Use Cell Phones"
The perception a seeing, hearing person has of the speech of another person whom he can see speak is quite complicated. Several years ago researchers exhibited an interesting demo. They showed an example in which they combined an audio track of a person saying one sound, with a mute synchronized video track of him saying a second very different sound, which all observers of the two tracks together would identify as yet a third very different sound!
Researchers often attempt to characterize language-speech as being made up of a limited alphabet of sounds, called phonemes, which are partially modified and then linked together in a sequence to constitute all speech. This approximation is often very useful. More useful yet, if harder to process, is a scheme in which the "alphabet" chosen is the much larger (NxN) number of adjacent phoeneme transitions.
Analogous to phonemes are visual representations of the human face making these sounds, called visemes. It is well known that while English has dozens of phonemes, it has well under a dozen visemes, with multiple phonemes mapping to a common viseme. This is what makes so-called "lip-reading" hard! No doubt disambiguation by experienced practitioners comes about because CONTEXT allows one to make a unique mapping to extant words.
The "Microsoft Agent" technology avatars used on Windows PCs to render speech, simultaneously display appropriate visemes as they produce the audio of the speech itself. Not only do they do this when fed text which is made into speech via artificial text-to-speech voices, but they ALSO try to exhibit appropriate visemes when fed an audio file which records spoken language. The SECOND version of this technology rolled out in late 1997, so it is really unfair to say that "nothing like" the Cellcom technology already exists!
By embellishing natural visemes with additional visual sound indicators, the Cellcom people arguably make a contribution, but I think that overly expansive claims serve only to encourage scorn among what one would call colleagues.
Of course the notion of recognizing phonemes and using them to re-render the speech in another form is one I myself have suggested for another purpose - compression e.g. on 25 April 2002 at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WGTA-Discussion/mes
"If communications costs are an issue, text-based chat (potentially interfaced to speech with speech recognition and text-to-speech engines!) can be effected at the incremental cost of Internet use - nothing."
I embellished the notion in a posting of 3 August 2002 at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WGTA-DDL/messa
stating:
"There is also a way to create a 'poor man's VoIP' network when one is limited to a narrowband link suitable only for text-based chat: one can use the text as a means of compressing voice. It would work so:
"One would have the parties to the conversation all use Internet text-chat clients. Received text would be rendered using text-to-speech engines. Sent text could be captured with speech recognition software on a sufficiently powerful and trained PC. Because the final text would be rendered phonically, one traditional problem with speech recognition would be greatly mitigated: substitution of homonyms and near-homonyms for actual words. And indeed, because the conversation would be interactive, not time-shifted like dictation of an e-mail, in the event of ambiguities or uncertainties a confused speaker could simply request the sender of the questionable speech to restate or at least repeat it. After all, that's what we *already* do when talking on the telephone, especially if the connection is poor or a speaker has heavily accented or impeded speech."
Of course this particular suggestion also BEGS an alternative way to help a deaf person accept a telephone call - use of a speech recognition product to produce text! In fact, many deaf folks have for decades use so-called "TTY" devices (more on this below) to receive text over the telephone. So, if one wanted to automate speech recognition within the context of using a telephone, why not do it at a *central* server whose output can be forwarded to the deaf person? That way he need not *carry* all that hardware for the few minutes per day he uses a telephone. [Note that using a computer in place of a human transcriber may also help spare embarassment in intimate chat!]
By the way, several wireless phone companies have worked on a TTY solution since the Federal Communications Commission mandated in 1996 that TTY users have wireless access to 911 emergency services. By early 2000, Bell Atlantic Mobile said it would sell wireless TTY phones by the second half of 2001.
From "The New York Times", February 3, 2000:
"[For telephony, the deaf have exploited]
"Two people equipped with TTY devices can communicate with each other over phone lines in a straight text conversation...
"Someone not equipped with a TTY device, on the other hand, can 'talk' to a deaf person via the Telecommunications Relay Service, a toll-free service that began in 1993 and is available in every [US] state. The service's operators, equipped with TTY devices, translate messages from text to voice and vice versa for both parties."
I'll add that a 6 March 2001 press release by the US National Science Foundation talks about "Andy the avatar... a 3D animation... [which can] interpret words, sentences and complicated concepts into sign language, combining signing, gestures and body language to simulate natural communication." That is, Andy is an ASL analog to the Microsoft Agent characters.
Dr. Ron Feigenblatt
http://www.geocities.com/neohephaest
As we all know, computers are completely idiotic when trying to turn speech into text. This is, of course, due to the fact that a lot of words/phrases sound pretty much the same, and people mumble.
The advantage of this system is that translating sounds to facial movements is relatively easy. Anytime you hear "ow", it's going to be the same facial movement producing it. My guess would be that your interpretation of the facial movement thing will be more accurate than the computer's inane text interpretation.
That would have to be based soley on speech-to-text translation. Less error prone than speech-to-animated lips? As many above posts mentioned, I don't think so.
Two men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a
canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can
call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices to the
end of the canyon. Someone's bound to hear us by then!"
So he leans over the basket and screams out, "Helllloooooo! Where
are we?" (They hear the echo several times).
Fifteen minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo!
You're lost!"
The shouter comments, "That must have been a mathematician."
Puzzled, his friend asks, "Why do you say that?"
"For three reasons. First, he took a long time to answer, second,
he was absolutely correct, and, third, his answer was absolutely useless."
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