Nuvoic project – New Year 2022 update
The New Year brings some exciting progress as we move into the second half of the Nuvoic Project! As well as participants’ ongoing work to test and give feedback on the Voiceitt speech recognition app, designed to support communication and Smart Home control for people who have atypical speech, we’re now moving into a new phase: voice sampling through Voiceitt Ensemble.
Ensemble
Voiceitt aim to improve the way their app works by collecting more speech samples from people with atypical speech. Currently, users have to teach the app to recognise each phrase or Smart Home command they want to use. In the future, Voiceitt want to offer ‘continuous recognition’, where the app would be able to recognise users’ speech without having to train every phrase in advance. To do this, they need lots more examples of non-standard speech and so we’re looking for volunteers to donate voice samples.
Participants would use Voiceitt’s Ensemble website to work through packs of phrases, making a recording for each one. The project team will support participants to register and work through their first recording session. After that they can carry on independently or with support from the project team or local teams as needed.
We’re offering gift cards of up to £100 to thank participants for their contribution, and we can also offer equipment or reimbursement of staff time to organisations supporting someone to take part. We already have our first few participants enrolled! If you or your organisation would like to be involved in this exciting development work, please contact our project co-ordinator: liz@karten-network.org.uk for more information.
Other Updates
Since our last update we’ve published our fantastic new project video, featuring participants from Enable Ireland, The Grange, Linkage College, Leonard Cheshire and Portland College demonstrating the different ways they’ve chosen to use the Voiceitt app. Thanks so much to everyone who contributed – it gives a great flavour of the project and we hope you’ll like it as much as we do!
Work on testing and feedback continues. We’ve recently welcomed new participants from Leonard Cheshire, New Bridge and St Joseph’s, while others have now come to the end of their testing and contributed valuable feedback to the development team. Huge thanks go to Beaumont College, Cedar Foundation, Enable Ireland, The Grange, Homefield College, National Star and SeeAbility who have all supported participants to complete their testing. We hope to continue working with you on Ensemble!
Get in touch!
We would love to hear from you if you, or someone you know may be interested in taking part in testing or donating speech samples through Ensemble. Please email our project co-ordinator: liz@karten-network.org.uk, or you can find more information and get in touch via our project web pages.