MedBio Announces Real-Time Voice Recognition
Last week I posted a note about my dream of a speech recognition system that could be mounted on a pair of eyeglasses and project real-time captions. This week I see MedBio Research Centre in Hawaii has announced just such a system. The MedBio “Speak ‘n Read” system integrates speech recognition into a Sony hand-held computer that records the speaker’s voice and immediately displays captions on both the computer screen and a small projector on a pair of eyeglass frames. The company’s web site lists plenty of qualifications on how well it works under what conditions, but it’s impressive there’s a commercial product out there now. Distribution will be through audiologists and other hearing professionals.
More Boomers Than We Knew Have Hearing Loss
Bad news for boomers, good news for hearing aid manufacturers: A survey by The Ear Foundation finds that more American baby boomers than previously thought are losing their hearing, with nearly half the total of those aged 50 to 59 reporting some degree of hearing loss. A 1990 National Health Interview Survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that only 20 percent in a comparable group were suffering from hearing loss. Read more
Infants With Cochlear Implants Get More Language Sooner
A recent research report published by a team at Indiana University provides more evidence that the younger a hearing-impaired child receives a cochlear implant, the quicker he or she is to acquire spoken language. Read more
Turn Down The Volume On Your IPOD
So now it’s Apple Computer’s IPOD. The London Evening Standard this week published a warning issued by the Royal National Institute of the Deaf in the U.K. that London commuters are permanently deafening themselves by turning up the volumes on their IPODs to drown out the noise in the city’s underground subway system. Read more
Cochlear Implants and Music
I went to my daughter’s piano recital last night and she was phenomenal. Because all music is horribly distorted for me, I couldn’t hear how well she played, but the response from the audience was awesome. My heart swelled. It also reminded me I’ve been meaning to point out a good article in the Bionic Beat newsletter. Read more
If You Ever Wondered Whether Early Screening Works….
Read “In This Silent World,” today’s entry in the personal weblog of British journalist Charles Arthur. It’s a beautiful, moving account of the agonizing process of discovery he and his wife went through with their newborn son. Read more
ScanSoft: Will Speech Processing Go The Way Of The Kurzweil Reader?
I frequently entertain myself with a futuristic vision of high-tech eyeglasses equipped with a tiny microphone, a tiny speech processing chip, and a tiny holographic projector that can transcribe everyday conversation in real time and project it in front of my eyes like the closed-captioning system on my TV. Believe it or not, all the technologies required to create such a product are known — it will only take another 10 or 15 (okay, maybe 20) years of development before we see such a device. Read more
Go America is Going Places
I’d heard of Go America in the go-go days of the dot-com boom, but back then it was just one of a million hot new suppliers of wireless data services for handheld computers. I never knew about its Wyndtell subsidiary, which focused exclusively on providing telecommunications services for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Read more