Voiceitt, a leading speech recognition company for non-standard speech, has launched a new assistive technology app which can be integrated with Amazon’s Alexa. The integration aims to increase independence and quality of life for individuals with speech and motor disabilities.
While a growing portion of the world’s population now has access to the advantages of smart home devices that enable them to turn on the lights, listen to music, and more with their voice, millions of people who live with speech impairments often cannot use their own voices to utilise such widespread speech technology. Now, these individuals can reclaim their independence with Voiceitt’s life-changing voice recognition technology.
With this launch, countless people with non-standard speech will be able to use their own voice to easily communicate with caregivers, loved ones and even their smart home devices.
The Voiceitt app can be downloaded for free by individuals or in volume by institutions, nursing facilities and organisations and is available on the Apple Store. The new app will empower individuals to navigate their environments and control smart home devices using their own voice commands.
The launch comes at a pivotal time for many with atypical speech. Isolation and social distancing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have left many individuals with speech and motor impairments either separated from loved ones or cut off from care facilities and support often crucial to their wellbeing. By initially offering its app at no cost, Voiceitt aims to mitigate some of the hardships created by the pandemic and improve the quality of life for as many people affected as possible.
“Everyone deserves to be able to express themselves and to be understood,” said Danny Weissberg, Voiceitt CEO and Co-founder. “With this launch, countless people with non-standard speech will be able to use their own voice to easily communicate with caregivers, loved ones and even their smart home devices. I’m so proud to make our technology available to this wonderful community. Voice recognition technology is finally becoming accessible to everyone.”
Voiceitt’s app integrates with Amazon’s Alexa to increase independence and quality of life for individuals with speech and motor disabilities. The Voiceitt experience begins with a simple training phase, allowing the software to better recognise an individual's speech. Once the user repeats a set of words and phrases several times, the Voiceitt app builds an AI-powered speech model that allows the individual to communicate specific commands.
“In collaboration with Voiceitt, we have been able to bring Alexa to even more customers,” said Peter Korn, Director of Accessibility at Amazon Lab126. “We strive to make all Amazon products and services as delightful and as easy to use as possible for everyone. Voiceitt’s integration with Alexa helps us do just that, enabling customers with speech impairments to enjoy all that Alexa has to offer and help them live more independently.”
Voiceitt’s proprietary automatic speech recognition engine – which combines machine learning with state-of-the-art speech analysis technology – can recognise not only atypical speech, but also speech patterns including utterances, cadence of speech, breathing pauses and non-verbal sounds, in any language. App users can build a personalised dictionary and train the app to recognise their unique pronunciation, a process which takes no more than five minutes on average per phrase. The app then recognises a user’s trained phrases in real-time and translates output into typical speech – enabling users to convey complex sentences that help them better navigate their daily lives.
“The degree of independence our app helps give to members of our user community inspires us to develop our technology even further and make it available to even more people. Our goal is to give a voice to everyone,” adds Weissberg.
The Voiceitt app is now available and free to download on the Apple Store.
