Stephen Hawking Finds A New Voice Thanks To Intel And SwiftKey

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Typically, a person’s voice only changes during puberty, but for one of the world’s preeminent scientists, the change is coming at a much later point in his life and for a vastly different reason.
As reported Tuesday by SlashGear’s Chris Davies, Professor Stephen Hawking has been given a new voice as part of a new Intel-developed communications system designed to allow the iconic theoretical physicist to express his thoughts more quickly.
The new technology allows Hawking, who suffers from a type of a motor neuron disease (MND) that has left him almost completely paralyzed, to type twice as fast as was previously possible and conduct web searches and other tasks up to 10 times more quickly. Furthermore, Davies said that Intel is releasing the new software under a free open-source license in order to help other affected by similar conditions.
Speaking at a London event, Hawking said that the new platform was “life changing” according to Rhiannon Williams of The Telegraph. “Medicine has not been able to cure me, so I rely on technology to help me communicate and live,” he added, and without it, he would not be able to speak today.
“We are pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” the professor added. “The development of this system has the potential to improve the lives of disabled people around the world and is leading the way in terms of human interaction and the ability to overcome communication boundaries that once stood in the way.”
Williams explained that Intel originally reached out to Hawking and offered to help him with his computer and speech-synthesizer technology in the mid-1990s, and several years ago he got in contact with representatives of the company regarding modernizing his current communication platform. Lama Nachman, Intel’s Principle Engineer, said that the system took three years to develop and is hooked over the professor’s glasses and onto his cheek.
“Motion in the cheek is detected through an infra-red sensor, allowing him to select a letter of the alphabet, which in turn triggers numerous word suggestions,” the Telegraph reporter noted. “One of the problems Professor Hawking encountered with his previous system was that his word-per-minute rate was decreasing.”
“Intel decided to reduce the amount of characters needed to be typed in order to complete full words, and were approached by British software application developers SwiftKey to help tailor the system to his needs,” she added. “Their text prediction technology means Professor Hawking now needs to type fewer than one in five of the letters for the words he uses. The new platform has been designed to mimic Professor Hawking’s current system exactly, featuring a near-identical user interface, and communicates with the current speech synthesizer.”
Hawking explained that his previous system was more than two decades old, and that he found it increasingly difficult to effectively communicate on a regular basis and complete the daily tasks that he enjoyed most. He called Intel’s technology “life-changing” and said that he hoped that it would serve him well over the next 20 years.
One important thing to note, said Paul Sawers of VentureBeat, is that while Intel’s technology will be available free of charge for use by researchers and developers to alter it and integrate it into their own systems starting in January, SwiftKey’s predictive keyboard technology will not be open-source. Instead, the company’s involvement will be “restricted to bespoke, individual cases such as Hawking,” Sawers said.
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