Telephone communication between deaf and hearing persons

It may be possible for a deaf person and a hearing person to converse over the telephone. The deaf user "speaks" by typing to a text-to-speech converter using a low-redundancy keyboard system. The hearing user speaks sentences one word at a time to a large-vocabulary, isolated-word-recognition system that displays a sentence lattice (a sequence of sets of likely matches for each word spoken). The deaf user then tries to find a sensible path through the sentence lattice. Successful implementation of such a system, under development at SRI International, requires adequate performance in text generation speed by deaf users, text-to-speech intelligibility, and word-at-a-time speaking by hearing users, as well as large-vocabulary speech recognition and disambiguation of sentence lattices by deaf users.