Speech Accessibility Project to Share Recordings and Data
The Speech Accessibility Project, a joint effort between several big tech firms and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is planning to share the voice recordings and related data of 211 people with Parkinson's with universities, nonprofits, and companies looking to develop speech technologies.
"The goal of the Speech Accessibility Project is to make speech technology accessible to everyone," said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, the project's leader and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in a statement. "We've already shown that, by training [automatic speech recognition technology] using one part of this dataset, it's possible to reduce error rates for people with Parkinson's disease by almost a factor of two. We are hoping that other universities and companies will be inspired and challenged by that result to come up with hundreds of good ideas for using this data to make speech technology more accessible."
The Speech Accessibility Project's available data includes text of the original speech prompts, a transcript of the participants' responses, and annotations describing the speech characteristics and how they affect participants.
The Speech Accessibility Project is being funded by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft and seeks to train voice recognition technologies to understand people with diverse speech patterns and disabilities. The project is still recruiting U.S. and Puerto Rican adults with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, Parkinson's disease, and who have had a stroke.
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