The University of Illinois works with Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and the Speech Accessibility Project to contribute to Improving voice recognition for people with disabilities and different speech patterns that are often not taken into account by artificial intelligence used in this area. This includes people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and other diseases that directly or indirectly interfere with speech.

Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor at the University of Illinois, said that “voice interfaces must be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This task was difficult because it requires a large amount of infrastructure, ideally one that can be supported by large technology companies, so we created a unique interdisciplinary team with expertise in linguistics, voice, artificial intelligence, security and privacy.“.

On the other hand, to include people with disabilities such as Parkinson’s disease, The Speech Accessibility Project will aim to collect samples from individuals representing a diversity of speech patternswhile The University of Illinois will recruit paid volunteers to contribute voice samples and help create a private, de-identified dataset that can be used to train machine learning models..

The bad thing is that initially the project will, at least for now, focus on American English, so hopefully in the future it will not only expand to other variants of the same language, but also to others from the rest of the world.

Some American organizations, such as the Davis Phinney Foundation, dedicated to Parkinson’s disease, and Team Gleason, which helps people with ALS, have already shown their support for the project promoted by the University of Illinois.

Despite the fact that technology helps make life easier for most people, in many cases it ends up excluding or hindering access for people with disabilities. On the other hand, it is not necessary to look at people with disabilities to find this type of situation, as lefties in many cases have to adapt to a world created for righties, a situation that can be complicated when a disability is added.