Markets in Everything: Talking Gloves
FastCompany.com -- "More than 275 million hearing-impaired people are unable to use speech to communicate. Sign language is one solution, but it's only as helpful as the number of people who know the language. That problem is what drove three Ukrainian students to develop EnableTalk, a pair of sensory gloves that help bridge that communication gap by turning sign language into speech (featured in the video above).
EnableTalk consists of two parts: The first is a pair of gloves fitted
with 15 sensors that determine what gestures are being signed. The
second is Windows software for smartphones that converts those gestures,
transmitted via Bluetooth, into sound waves. Those sound waves are
finally translated into recognizable speech using Microsoft's Speech and
Bing APIs."
6 Comments:
I remember several years ago a high school student developed a similar machine. Same principle as the glove here, but it only understood letters of the alphabet, which it then transmitted to a small digital display.
If the gloves/sensors are just rendering signs into written words on the smartphone, couldn't the user just type a message onto the smartphone, and skip the signs?
"...couldn't the user just type a message onto the smartphone, and skip the signs?"
Haha ya but whats the fun in that? At least this way you can see some on flip out in silence when coffee spills from their cup.
Awesome idea though. Much respect.
moneyjihad: "couldn't the user just type a message onto the smartphone, and skip the signs?"
Moneyjihad, I'm hearing impaired, though not deaf. My wife and I have tried to learn sign language, so that we can more easily communicate in noisy environments. But sign language is not easy to learn.
Persons who communicate via sign language can form words and sentences extremely fast - almost as fast as most of us can speak. Actually, some multisyllable words can be signed faster than spoken.
I don't think many of us can type on smartphones anywhere near as fast as experienced persons can sign. So "skipping the signs" and typing would likely slow communication.
Instead of representing words, represent letters, to spell words. That would be much easier to learn. A glove could be used to detect the letters, and send them to a smart phone to print, vocalize or transmit.
Tom: "Instead of representing words, represent letters, to spell words. That would be much easier to learn. "
Perhaps easire to learn, but much, much slower for the person who is signing. Think of how slow your verbal communication would be if you spelled out every word you wished to speak.
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