request for vivoca ppt to conduct seminar

vivoca ppt

Voice Input Voice Output Communication Aid (VIVOCA)
The project aims to develop a portable (eventually body-worn) speech-in/speech-out communication aid for people with disordered or unintelligible speech, initially concentrating on people with moderate to severe dysarthria (people who have difficulty in controlling and co-ordinating the muscles used in speech). The device will effectively translate the speech of a dysarthric person into clear speech output (synthesised or recorded). This will be of use to dysarthric people in social situations where they interact with non-familiar communication partners, such as at work, when shopping, in the hospital, on the telephone etc.. There is ample evidence to show that such a device is needed and would be of benefit. The intention is to provide the user with a device that performs like a human interpreter, recognising the disordered speech and producing an intelligible equivalent.

The work builds on the STARDUST project (NEAT A230), which successfully developed a means for dysarthric people to control assistive technology by speech, but requires many innovative steps to address this particularly challenging problem, including the development of:

Techniques for optimising recognition of variable speech in noisy environments
Speech interpretation and translation in a natural and acceptable way
A means of allowing the aid to be portable (including body-worn) and to help natural face to face communication
Techniques for adaptation as the speech and the needs of the user change over time, including for people with progressive neurological disease (e.g. MND)