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.

Comments

Technology overkill

[tyler_larson]

What was wrong with speech to text?

Re:Technology overkill

[Kintanon]

How the hell do you draw that conclusion? How could speech to text be MORE processor intensive than converting speech to MOVEMENT on a face?! It's orders of magnitude harder to translate a sound into a muscle group movement on a computer generated face than it is to turn it into a group of characters representing that sound.

Kintanon

Re:Technology overkill

[Dephex Twin]

Who says the latter is easier?

By doing the pictures, you're essentially leaving the last part (converting the phonemes into words and sentences) to the deaf person reading the lips, instead of a computer.

In order for the computer to do a more reliable job on this last part, it either has to take a long time or the processor has to be really fast. And even with that, the computer is still going to make a lot of mistakes.

This is certainly nowhere near as brain-dead as you make it out to be.

Re:Technology overkill

[fishbowl]

"2. software interprets phonetics converts it into words"

Is a very different, much more complex problem than:

"2. software interprets phonetics into picture based lip movements"

Consider that for the first example, we need the computer to understand the language,
whereas in the second example, all the computer needs is a fourier transform and
Max Headroom anatomy.

Personally, I think it would be simpler and more effective to put a
camera on the phone and transmit an image of the speakers face.

Complicated

[batboy78]

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.

Speaking from experience

[FunkyELF]

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.

WHy should they.

[Unknown Poltroon]

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.

Ugh

[NilObject]

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.

Re:Oh, great...

[sczimme]

Yes, because the deaf person is bound to have the ringer turned way up...

Oy.

Talking back?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine for the deaf person, but how do they communicate back? Does the phone convert from mouth movements to audio?

Re:lip reading..

[Dephex Twin]

Well, for comparison, see how well a speech recognition program does with the same sentence.

And unless you just randomly blurted out the sentence, you probably have context in the surrounding sentences (e.g. you are talking about fig newtons, food in general, newton's law, whatever).

I'd definitely put my money on the lip-reader, frankly.

Better yet:

[Misch]

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?

Re:Better yet:

[Misch]

Services like TTY and phone relays have long since been made redundant by the advent of universally available and reasonably inexpensive e-mail. But taxpayers still spend hundreds of millions a year subsidizing these obsolete services.

May you never go deaf then. May you never buy a product that breaks and have to call a phone number for customer services. May you never have to call an emergency services number. May you never have to call the pizza place to order a pizza.

The differnce between e-mail and TTY is the difference between push and pull technology. With e-mail, there's no guarantee that your e-mail is ever received, much less opened, read and processed.

Because of this, e-mail cannot (and does not!) qualify under the ADA soley as a reasonable accomodation.

I've worked as a secretary (in a school for the deaf, no less.) I know e-mails can take a long time to get delivered. There's still time between when it gets delivered and when it actually got read and processed by me. (Usually not long, but on some crazy hectic days, it could take some time.)

I hate feeding the trolls, but this one needed to be thwacked over the head.