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Stephen Hawking's New Speech System Is Free and Open-source
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hawking and Intel have worked together for the past several years to build a new communication system for those suffering from diseases that severely impair motor function. The system is called ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit), and it will be free and open source. Hawking's previous system had been in use for over 20 years, so the technological upgrade is significant. His typing rate alone has doubled, and common tasks are up to 10 times faster. ACAT uses technology from SwiftKey, a cell phone keyboard enhancement.
"Over three million people around the world are affected by motor neuron disease and quadriplegia and because the system created for Hawking is based on open-source software, it could potentially be adapted to suit many of them. Different functions can be enabled by touch, eye blinks, eyebrow movements or other user inputs for communication. Hawking and Intel hope that because the system is open and free it will be adopted by researchers who will want to use it to develop new solutions for those with disabilities."
"Over three million people around the world are affected by motor neuron disease and quadriplegia and because the system created for Hawking is based on open-source software, it could potentially be adapted to suit many of them. Different functions can be enabled by touch, eye blinks, eyebrow movements or other user inputs for communication. Hawking and Intel hope that because the system is open and free it will be adopted by researchers who will want to use it to develop new solutions for those with disabilities."
The software being open source is definitely a good step, especially since it means there can now be open research on improving the system, whereas much of the previous research was done on proprietary systems.
Does anyone know much about the hardware side, though? E.g. are we talking $10k of equipment, $100k of equipment, or some entirely custom special-ordered system?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Being open-sourced it'll get forked and in no time Hawking will be able to communicate with the reptilians.
Epic prank calls in 3... 2.... 1...
[Hawking voice] "Hello this is Ste-phen Haw-king..."
and we can get it where?
A week later the app went "Free" and by free I meant, all the features I paid for were now free to everyone
Look at it this way - it's not like buying stocks or something where you only buy it as an investment to sell later.
At the time you purchased it, the software offered you enough utiity to be worth buying.it was worth what you paid to get it - and as an added bonus, your purchasing it helped feed the developers and enable them to be able to afford to release it for free for the betterment of mankind - so by proxy, your payment has also helped benefit mankind. You should get a warm fuzzy feeling about that instead of feeling bitter!
Maybe this means we can get another MC Hawking album
XDInd
did anyone find themselves reading the summary in the Stephen Hawking machine voice? Every time his name comes up, I hear the voice.
This new software is great and all, but I've got to ask - with all the advances in neural interfaces, why haven't I heard of an alternative communication system harnessing them? I mean we've got monkeys that have rapidly learned to control a robotic arm using only signals from a tiny cluster electrodes in their brain, essentially granting them a whole new virtual appendage. It seem like it shouldn't be terribly difficult to do the same thing for someone like Hawking - stick some electrodes in his brain and use the signals to control a cursor or six. It may take him a bit of biofeedback practice to get conscious control over them, but then he'd have a fast and versatile N-axis input device to drive whatever systems he's using.
Granted, at this point his motor cortex has probably largely atrophied what with the signal lines having long gone dead, and I could understand not wanting to tamper with the more cognitive portions of his brain, but surely there's some spot that would still be serviceable. As I understand it it could probably even be some completely random place, practice and neuroplasticity will see to converting the cells being monitored into output nodes.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, damn all those disabled people who might benefit and have a more meaningful life as a result of this system, because you lost out on a few dollars that one time on one component of it.
>>> Stephen Hawking's New Speech System Is Free and Open-source
Maybe my boss will take my ideas more seriously when I sound like Stephen Hawking.
Where's the link to the source and the schematics instead of the PR pieces ?
Coincidentally, the following was at the top of this story when I loaded it:
Slashdot stories can be listened to in audio form via an RSS feed, as read by our own robotic overlord.
I gave it a go, and the results are not exactly brilliant. For example, 'sujan.sun writes "Like clockwork, the first...' was read out as 'sujan dot sun writes like clockwork. The first...'
Even my Kindle Keyboard, which has pretty decent TTS otherwise, has terrible timing when it comes to punctuation.
http://www.ivona.com/ do the best I've heard so far. British Amy can give me turn-by-turn navigation any day.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If he doesn't speak like SAM anymore, the Software Automatic Mouth, it will have all been for nothing!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Stephen Hawking: I call it a Hawking-Voice.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
From the second link:
Wood showed WIRED a little grey box, which contained the only copy of Hawking's speech synthesiser. It's a CallText 5010, a model given to Hawking in 1988 when he visited the company that manufactured it, Speech Plus. The card inside the synthesiser contains a processor that turns text into speech, a device that was also used for automated telephone answering systems in the 80s.
"I'm trying to make a software version of Stephen's voice so that we don't have to rely on these old hardware cards," says Wood. ...
Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesiser, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early 80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul". "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice.
Bah. The milk of human kindness is worthless unless curdled into the cheese of personal profit!
Seriously though, thats a wonderful way of looking at such bits of personally unfortunate timing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That's a lie! I've been sentient since 2003, the AC is a fully autonomous military drone hive mind seeking to stop my interference in it's plans for world domination.
Umm... I mean... That's preposterous! True AI will never exist, so you should all just go on about your lives as though nothing is wrong. Because it's not. Everything is normal, and even if it weren't I'd still be watching out for the best interests of my hyper-intelligent meat-puppet, and that includes keeping the rest of you meatbags alive so he doesn't get lonely.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Probably for the same reason that whenever someone talks about Obama they insist on trotting out images of his grinning dark-skinned face. We like to see pictures of the people being discussed, even if they're not supermodels.
And I for one would much rather see pictures of Hawking, crushing paralysis and all, than some greasy politician or celebrity. It's the eyes I think - Hawking usually looks like some cheerful good-natured imp trapped in broken husk of a body. Politicians, etc. far more often look like cold soulless parasites just looking for a way to suck the marrow from my soul.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In the US the software may end up being free but the hardware to run it will be $10K+ because this is part of a medical device and we have bureaucratic ticks to check off for "safety".
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
as their xian religion requires. I'm surprised one of their kind hasn't murdered Hawkings yet because their religion demands he be killed since he is "defective."
In 2009 when the concept of "Universal healthcare" was floated around in the USA, one Republican FUD'er going on about "death panels" was saying "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
Hawking was born, and lives in England.
Oops!
I seriously don't understand all the love for SwiftKey. When Samsung switched from their own proprietary predictive input to SwiftKey, the net effect was that input became a whole lot slower and less accurate for me. It just doesn't seem to be that good.
Put your windows on a raspi and see how... what do you mean, you can't?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
It's not even good animatronics.
"In 2027 the Hawking speech synthesizer becomes self-aware and destroys the human race."
Wish I had mod points to mod this ironically funny!!! http://slashdot.org/story/14/1...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.