- Share
- Tweet
- Link
- Comment
New speech datasets, software target greater inclusion
Oct 5, 2022, 2:24 pm EDT |
Alessandro Mascellino
Categories
Biometric R&D | Biometrics News | Voice Biometrics
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has unveiled the Speech Accessibility Project, an initiative to make voice biometrics and speech analysis systems more inclusive of diverse speech patterns for people with disabilities.
According to a blog post on the UIUC website, the project will be supported by tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, alongside various nonprofits.
The Speech Accessibility Project will focus on developing speech recognition and biometric systems capable of interpreting speech patterns associated with disabilities like Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome.
To this end, the initiative will see the collection of speech samples from paid volunteers representing a diversity of speech patterns.
The samples will then be compiled into a private, de-identified dataset that can be used to train machine learning models to understand various speech patterns better.
The Speech Accessibility Project will initially focus on American English. It will be led by Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, the UIUC professor of electrical and computer engineering, with the support of Heejin Kim, a research professor in linguistics, [...]