

Father Makes an iPad App to Help His Son Speak - kachnuv_ocasek
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/24/verbalvictor-ipad-app_n_801098.html

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chime
This is very close to the independent project I've been working on lately:
<http://chir.ag/ktype> \- my aim is to make an iPad app to help people with
speech disabilities communicate better and faster. I can't wait to try out
VerbalVictor. If anyone knows Dr. Pauca personally, I'd love to get an
introduction. The article mentions that lots of people have contacted him
lately and I'd rather not bother him if he's busy.

> ...he said, "and if it doesn't work out, they're a little bit at a loss as
> to what to do next. We still need to do more to help professionals
> understand what's available and what might be best suited for individuals."

That is also part of what KType is. I am hoping to catalog (in Wiki format)
everything out there related to this topic. It doesn't matter which solution
works, as long as something works. Everyone is doing their best to make
something that works and it does work for a subset of the users, just not
everyone. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to update my reference page with
more links/resources: <http://chir.ag/ktype/research:reference>

------
CWuestefeld
Related ideas:

1\. I wish that the dentist had a keyboard I could type on. I know that most
people couldn't use it very effectively, but as a decent touch-typist, I could
communicate with him while he's working on me.

2\. A number of years ago, a friend told me about his mother who'd had surgery
for throat (?) cancer, and can no longer speak normally. He rigged up for her
a small (musical) keyboard, with each key corresponding to a phoneme, so she
could speak with the synth. At the time he talked about wishing he had audio
recordings of her own voice to use. He proposed a "voice bank" that folks
could store such recordings for just such a purpose, at a nominal charge.

~~~
_ques
Voice bank algo challenge:

What is the shortest sentence (or set of sentences) you can construct that
covers all the phonemes required for a voice bank?

(Corollary: Convincing someone into saying these sentences now lets you
impersonate them using text-to-speech)

