Spoken Language Systems for Educators and Health ProfessionalsWe believe that spoken language technologies have tremendous potential for helping people with speech, language, visual, and hearing problems. While speech synthesis has been used for a long time for helping the blind, and voice control of devices likewise has been available for the motorically challenged, people are now exploring ways of using these technologies for teaching and remediation purposes.Our main thrust in this area over the last few years has been the language training project. Funded by a $1.8 million NSF Challenge grant, the goal of this project is to develop an animated conversational agent for learning and language training with profoundly deaf children having cochlear implants. In this project, we work together with teachers and speech therapists, and develop software that best serves the children, building on the expertise of these professionals. We view this project as a model for other projects that we are interested in pursuing with educators and health professionals. We are also exploring a collaboration with a startup company to develop software for children with language problems. |