VoxAid 2006: Telephone Communication for Hearing and/or Vocally Impaired People.

Speech and/or hearing impaired people have difficulties with voice communication. In case of face-to-face conversation they can find a common communication channel (e.g. sign language, paper, etc.), but without an appropriate system they are unable to talk over the phone. The goal of the present study is to introduce the design and development steps of a system for vocally and/or hearing impaired people, which helps them to communicate via telephone with any person. Speech output is realized by text-to-speech (TTS) technology and speech input is provided by automatic speech recognition (ASR). The visual and the speech user interfaces enable users on both side of the phone line (a speech and hearing impaired person at one end, a non-speech-and-hearing-disabled person at the other end) to communicate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]