Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer goes public

Stephen Hawking is not only one of the most prominent theoretical physicists of our time, but he also has tremendous willpower. Not everyone will find the courage to resist for decades almost complete paralysis caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The scientist lost the ability to speak back in 1985, when, after complications caused by pneumonia, he had a tracheotomy. To restore his ability to communicate with other people, his friends gave Stephen a speech synthesizer, which he still uses today. The software for this synthesizer was written by Intel programmers, and now it will be available to everyone absolutely free.

This system is called The Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT for short) and allows you to fully manage your computer with minimal user movement. Stephen Hawking enters the text into a speech synthesizer with the help of a mimic muscle on his cheek. This is the only muscle in the body of the professor, with which he can still move, so a special sensor is fixed directly in front of her. Software developers from Intel hope that after they publish their software in free access, various enthusiastic programmers will make it even better and more convenient, after which it can be used in an even wider area.

ACAT consists of three main components. The first is the process of tracking movements of the facial muscles of Stephen Hawking. The second is a system for entering letters that form individual words. And the third is a predictive input method, somewhat reminiscent of the T9 word prediction system, but much more accurate and adaptable to a specific user. ACAT can be used not only to enter texts, but also to manage various applications and to surf the Internet.

Of course, Intel itself will not stop improving this software, but it will allow anyone who wants to help make it better, more efficient and more convenient than it is now. Download the source code ACAT, you can absolutely free on the portal Github , there all the necessary documentation will be available to you in order to understand the structure of the system from the inside. True, there is one small “but” - the system works exclusively under the control of the Windows operating system, so the owners of computers based on Linux and Mac OS remained out of work. But who knows, maybe in the near future there will be a kind person who is porting ACAT to other operating systems. Time will tell.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/technology/sintezator-golosa-stivena-xokinga-stal-dostoyaniem-obshhestvennosti.html.