VoIPText: Voice chat for deaf and hard of hearing people

The spread of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, equipment and clients is transforming telephony worldwide. In addition to providing inexpensive, or even free, international telephone calls there is potentially additional benefit in using computer networks to facilitate telephony. Currently hearing impaired and deaf users are excluded from these VoIP services; unless the message is in text form to begin with the hearing impaired user cannot access these services effectively. The VoIPText project, funded by Ofcom, looked at the feasibility of utilizing “speech to text” software in order to generate text from natural speech over VoIP and so improve accessibility. The project has assessed the accuracy of current state of the art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software to assess if it achieves a reasonable level of performance. Assessments of software developed during the project were carried out in peoples´ homes over eight weeks and the trials indicated some issues associated with the implementation but showed real potential for ASR in telecommunications for deaf people.