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. 

Some of our fantastic participants show how they’ve been using Voiceitt’s app to communicate or control smart home technology like lights, blinds and TVs, ask Alexa about the weather or play music or the radio, using their own voices. Thanks to everyone who contributed including participants and support teams from The Grange, Hill House Care Home, Linkage College and Portland College, the team at Voiceitt and film-maker Misha Pletinsky.

Voiceitt is now available from the AppStore! Older versions installed using TestFlight will no longer update and will eventually stop working, but users can keep using Voiceitt with all their existing phrases and commands by downloading the latest version of Voiceitt from the AppStore to their iPad or iPhone. Voiceitt have also added new game-style features so users can earn points and achievements when they use Voiceitt for something new. We look forward to hearing what our participants think of the new features!

See Amazon’s article on Voiceitt, included in their Day One blog, describing how Voiceitt helps users who have non-standard speech to communicate and control Smart Home technology via Alexa.

Forbes magazine has published an article on user testing of Voiceitt through the Nuvoic project: Voiceitt App For Atypical Speech — A Triumph In Disability Co-Design, by UK journalist Gus Alexiou. Gus writes about diversity, equity, inclusion and issues affecting people living with physical disabilities.

To celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May and highlight the fun side of accessibility, Voiceitt posted a video of Nuvoic participant Mark using Voiceitt to ask Alexa to tell a joke

Work continues this year on the Nuvoic Project, our collaboration with specialist app developer Voiceitt which aims to improve access to voice recognition technologies for people who have speech difficulties. Voiceitt’s app supports people who want to communicate or control Smart Home technologies using their own voice, but who have difficulty being understood. The Karten Network is leading on user involvement and testing in the UK.

Updates

We’re delighted to welcome our new Project Technologist, Sean Connolly, to the Nuvoic Project Team! Sean joins us on secondment from his previous role as Training Officer for Cedar Foundation’s Inclusion Works service, bringing his experience of supporting and advising individuals and organisations on the use of assistive technology, as well as a strong interest in smart home technologies. Welcome Sean!

Since our last newsletter, we’ve continued to work with Karten Centres and other partner organisations to recruit people with non-standard speech to test the Voiceitt app, and we’re delighted to welcome participants from FitzRoy, New Bridge Horizons, SeeAbility and St John’s College, as well as others who’ve contacted us directly. They join those already involved individually or through Beaumont College, Cedar Foundation, Enable Ireland, Leonard Cheshire, Homefield College, National Star, The Grange Centre and Young Epilepsy.

We now have participants using Voiceitt to access audiobooks and music, control lights and TVs as well as to support their communication. We’re getting lots of useful feedback about the app, and Voiceitt have recently implemented switch access and predictive text in response to testers’ comments. They’re currently working to support voice and video calls, including Alexa’s Drop-in feature, which we expect to be popular among our testers.

Participants at Hill House (Leonard Cheshire) and The Grange have also contributed video clips where they demonstrate the app and talk about how they use it. These will be combined and published later in the year – watch this space!

Thanks to all our participants and partner organisations for your contribution so far!

Get involved!

We’re still recruiting participants to test the Voiceitt app, especially the new Smart Home features, giving integrated control of an Amazon Echo smart speaker.  We’re also looking to recruit people with impaired speech who are willing to donate voice recordings to help develop Voiceitt’s technology.

We’re keen to work with new partner organisations who support people with impaired speech, and we have funding available to reimburse organisations for time spent supporting the project.​ We can also work directly with individuals, family members and carers to support participation, and we offer vouchers, as well as free use of Voiceitt during participation and for six months afterwards, to thank participants for their contribution. Please see our project web pages for details of what’s involved.

Get in touch!

We would love to hear from you if you, your organisation or someone you know may be interested in taking part, or if you’d like more information. 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.

Congratulations to Voiceitt on their ‘Best of Innovation’ award from the Consumer Electronics Show. Read more about the Innovation Awards at CES 2021