Sara A Smolley: Making Voice Tech Accessible To Those Who Need It Most
Sara: Voice-driven technologies are increasingly mainstream. For most of us, voice-activation can be convenient and fun. But for millions of people with motor-control challenges and speech disabilities due to developmental disorders, degenerative disease, stroke, and brain injury, the ability to communicate and be understood, to navigate the environment and control devices by voice can be life changing. Many who can potentially benefit from a “voice first” world cannot access these technologies because along with motor control challenges, they do not have standard speech patterns. Standard speech recognition isn’t designed to work for impaired speech (“dysarthria”). Voiceitt’s mission and vision is to make voice technology accessible to everyone.