Israeli lip-reading phone
By Ryan Block 
posted September 22nd 2004 3:59PM
posted September 22nd 2004 3:59PM
It's nice to see so much going on in the field
technology for the disabled today,
kind of makes you think mankind is actually doing good or something amongst all the embroilments and political turmoil.
An Israeli company has developed a $200 cellphone for the lip-reading deaf; the caller's voice is electronically mimed
by a character on screen, whose lips can be read. Well hot damn, why didn't we think of that? Guess we'll just have to
put all our brainpower to work figuring out how to make the thing expressively swear or spit invective, kind of like
with those awful Oddcast ads.
[Via textually.org]
I mean, I thought that mimicking the human face was the hardest thing to do convincingly....at least thats what I thought when I was doing it for Hasbro video games and when the guys at Sony said it about Spiderman 2 effects.
Unless it vibrates and pauses inbetween each word stuff like "onomonopia" will be almost impossible to distinguish from "i'm go'n go pee"
if you're going to translate speech into mimicking facial movements, why not simply just translate the speech into readable text?
Why wouldn't deaf people just use SMS (and why wouldn't companies just offer deaf people special discounts on SMS gadgets)?
I had a roomate who used to use a Sidekick on T-Mobile. However, the thing was only really good if someone else could send him an SMS, MMS, or an IM (as it had that built-in). What a service for the hearing-impared really needs was a speech to text translator (of course as many know those are kind of rough around the edges right now and require each person to traini a device if you want any kind of vast vocabulary).
If this system works well, you wouldn't have to make seperate versions for different languages. The company would have a global product.
Does anyone know who is developing this? Aren't the RNID involved in developing something similar?
Deaf and Hard of Hearing, use the Telecommunications Relay Service where an Operator acts as the Speech Text translator.
but then the operator would know all your secrets.
The real problem is that even with a good lipreader and clear speech one can only get about a third of what is said with any accuracy - the rest has to be guessed from context. Many people would get less than that - although better than nothing it would be quite frustrating.
Speech to text would be SO much better. Yes it would be a local solution but I am sure one could program the phone with different algorithms for the most common languages.
And then of course there's speech to sign language, but that can already be done with some degree of accuracy.