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January 22, 2008
My Challenge to the Internet Communications Industry: Create a Real-time Captions Application
I recently received an email from a friend who asks:
“Will there ever be a real-time captioning of live voice communications using the cell phone on the recipient end, specifically for hearing impaired such as me? I've been hearing impaired since age of 3 now 46 with very little hearing residual w/ the aid of hearing device. I have a basic cell phone for chatting w/ the wife and close friends, but when the call comes from business, strangers or detailed info, I'm lost! This impacts my personal life and productivity at work. Seeing the picture? If I can bypass the myriads searching of technologies info, maybe you can help me and to save time; this would mean a lot to me.
What I'm hoping is the ability to use my cell phone w/ the option to listen and/or to read 'live' text from the caller (cell or LAN), similar concept as Captel. Captel is designed for the use of LAN and w/ analog hookup, great for at home or office but I'm out in the field or traveling 70% of the time. See Captel website for more info: http://www.captionedtelephone.com/how-it-works.phtml. I know there are several tools out in the market today. To name few and my opinion as follow:
TTY - If I really have to use it. Too much delay and callers are impatient to use it w/ instructions. Some recipients are thinking as a sales call and they hang up. This technology is a thing of past.
Captel - Good for home or offices but not out in the field. Captel promise a cell phone version, being saying that for years, but they lacked HSDPA or dual-mode Wi-fi and cellular device.
IM, SMS - Good on my end but users are tired of texting me, too much delay and some are just too lazy. Some lacked Qwerty.
CART - Foot the bill and I'll use it. Actually, I never use it and very costly if I use it daily, all day long.
IP Relay - Unfamiliar callers do not know I'm hearing impaired…
Someway, I'm so frustrated the fact w/ all of these technologies bombarding everywhere, why isn't there such service/device for the hearing impaired? Hearing aids technology can only go so far and cochlear implant are not guaranteed, so if anyone can invent these devices why not live captions on cell phones? Correct me if I'm wrong; is this technology in reality not ready for mobile phones...you know, the delay from the network, lack of real-time speech synthesis engines and related cost are not ready for commercialization for mobile devices or is it all politics?”
- - -
And after thinking about this, I thought it would be great to challenge friends from the Internet Communications Industry to create such a tool and present it on stage with me at Spring 2008 VON.x. I’m wondering if someone with an Asterisk box can create a publicly available application that can be dialed, where the users punches in the recipients phone number they want to talk to, and it uses vXML speech recognition tools to transcribe the call on a web site that the users accesses. Or would it be possible to use Skype's open API to create such a tool for Skype? Or even something that works with SIP? It just seems like it could be a fun challenge -- using off the shelf VoIP and speech recognition technologies to solve problems for people with disabilities. I presume this is not all that hard to do, but I may be wrong.
As an aside, having people working on this project will give the Internet Communications community a great story to point to especially as Congressman Markey floats a piece of disability access legislation and puts these issues front and center. I think it's very helpful to see if my friends who are creative Internet innovators can also become leaders in enabling and empowering disability access.
I’m looking to members of the Internet Communications Industry who are up to this challenge to create a Real-time Captions Application and be prepared to demonstrate this at Spring 2008 VON.x on March 18th in San Jose. If you are up to this challenge, please contact me.
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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.
Tags: VoIP, VoN, disability access, captions, hearing impaired, Public Policy, Jeff Pulver
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Posted by jeff on January 22, 2008 06:02 AM | Permalink
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Posted by: 升降机 at July 14, 2008 06:00 AM
Fully-automated transcription is super-hard and you won't see it working reliably for a long time.
There are a few approaches to the problem, some better than others, but it will be a while before your friend gets what he wants.
http://blogs.msdn.com/sprague/search.aspx?q=transcription&p=1
Posted by: Richard Sprague at January 26, 2008 11:02 AM
The challenge is that speech recognition is still at a stage where it requires punctuation and training to get sensical results.
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http://www.acappella.com.au
Acappella improves the reliability of transcripts by telling the typist who is speaking during transcription, and reduces transcription time.
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