Multilingual Speech-Based Technology Helps the Blind to Read

Paving the way for much more intuitive, interactive, and user-friendly ‘spoken dialogue technology,’ DUMAS developed a multilingual speech-based system that creates new ways to communicate.

DUMAS, a three-year IST-funded project, began by developing the Athos platform, a generic and modular framework for multilingual speech-based systems. A consortium of eight partners from Sweden, Finland, Germany and the UK, its researchers built on basic speech technology, such as speech synthesis and recognition, and focused on dialogue level problems to develop systems that can process both spoken and text inputs in several languages, and provide appropriate verbal responses to the user.

One of the software programs from the project “can identify which sentences of an email are written in a particular language and switch the speech synthesizer to that language,” says Dr. Björn Gambäck. “So if a sentence is in Swedish it’s read in a Swedish voice, and if the next sentence is in English it’s read by an English voice.”

AthosNews, another output of the project, is a prototype telephone system that reads English and Finnish newspapers for the visually impaired or for people in situations where they are using their sight for other tasks. The database currently contains bulletins from the Finnish Federation for the Visually Impaired and the largest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, as well as the two most popular afternoon papers, Iltasanomat and Iltalehti.

The Finnish version of AthosNews is currently being tested with about 50 visually-impaired test users. The AthosNews system for English has been completed and successfully evaluated with a group of 10 users, divided evenly between blind and sighted.

Source: Based on information from DUMAS and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science AB