EasyVoice: Breaking barriers for people with voice disabilities

Abstract

Text-to-speech technology has been broadly used to help people with voice disabilities to overcome their difficulties. With text-to-speech, a person types at a keyboard, the text is synthesized, and the sound comes out through the computer speakers. In recent years, Voice over IP (VoIP) applications have become very popular and have been used by people worldwide. These applications allow people to talk for free over the Internet and also to make traditional calls through the Public-Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) at a small fraction of the cost offered by traditional phone companies. This paper presents an application, called EasyVoice, that integrates different systems to allow a person with motor impairment and voice disabilities to talk with another person located anywhere in the world. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.