Speech Accessibility Project Now Recruiting in Canada
Author: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Published: 2024/10/19
Publication Type: Announcement
Topic: Canada (Publications Database)
Page Content: Synopsis Definition Introduction Main Item
Synopsis: The Speech Accessibility Project is now recruiting Canadian adults with Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Down syndrome and people who have had a stroke. With more than 100,000 individuals with Parkinson’s disease in Canada, we are eager to invite these individuals to contribute their speech to this significant project. They too will share in the satisfaction of improving automatic speech recognition and thus quality of life for Parkinson’s disease. Funded by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using the project to train voice recognition technologies to understand people with diverse speech patterns and disabilities.
Why it matters: The Speech Accessibility Project article highlights a collaborative effort to improve speech recognition technology for individuals with diverse speech patterns and disabilities. This initiative, led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and supported by major tech companies, aims to create a dataset of speech samples from people with various conditions affecting speech. By addressing the current limitations of voice recognition systems, this project has the potential [...]