Just one point of clarification. I happen to work for an AAC company, who if I mentioned their name, I would have to say all sorts of things about this is my own opinion and not theirs, blahblah, so I won't say it, though if you are interested, I probably mention it on my website.
Anyway - the dedicated device thing is a restriction placed by Medicare and Medicaid. I personally have spent a good amount of time trying to figure out a way of getting around that restriction because presumably some percentage of users would want an open device, but we basically have to lock it down, or else the device can't be funded, and then Sally user would have to pay for it herself. I would rather have her insurance pay for it so that she can have a voice than not be able to afford a device and not speak.
As for the cellphone market - try talking to Nokia or whoever to get them to get their product accessible - or else try to reverse engineer it yourself, and be obsolete in a week. Do you (DM) have any suggestions on how to go about getting that to work?
Please post your "Asian manufacturers ready to drop PDA internals", etc. what sort of hardware is it, and how fast is the processor? What sort of speech recognition do you think you are going to do on a Palm Pilot? Okay, now playback pre-recorded speech, of course, decoding mp3s, to save room, since there is only a 16 meg flash chip in it... Get my drift?
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Just one point of clarification. I happen to work for an AAC company, who if I mentioned their name, I would have to say all sorts of things about this is my own opinion and not theirs, blahblah, so I won't say it, though if you are interested, I probably mention it on my website.
Anyway - the dedicated device thing is a restriction placed by Medicare and Medicaid. I personally have spent a good amount of time trying to figure out a way of getting around that restriction because presumably some percentage of users would want an open device, but we basically have to lock it down, or else the device can't be funded, and then Sally user would have to pay for it herself. I would rather have her insurance pay for it so that she can have a voice than not be able to afford a device and not speak.
As for the cellphone market - try talking to Nokia or whoever to get them to get their product accessible - or else try to reverse engineer it yourself, and be obsolete in a week. Do you (DM) have any suggestions on how to go about getting that to work?
Please post your "Asian manufacturers ready to drop PDA internals", etc. what sort of hardware is it, and how fast is the processor? What sort of speech recognition do you think you are going to do on a Palm Pilot? Okay, now playback pre-recorded speech, of course, decoding mp3s, to save room, since there is only a 16 meg flash chip in it... Get my drift?