Project Relate: Google helps solve language errors

pte20211110022 Technology / Digitization, Research / Development

The AI ​​system provides support for transcoding into spoken or written texts

Living with speech defects: testing the Google “Relate” app (Photo: Google.com)

Mountain View (pte022/10.11.2021/11:30) – Google’s “Project Relate” program interprets and translates the way people talk about people who have a severe speech disorder due to an illness, such as a stroke, that is difficult for anyone to understand, into language Written or spoken texts in an artificial voice. Development began in 2018. Since then, the system has recorded millions of speech samples and translated them into plain text using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Three options to choose from

Speech impairment has three options: listening, repetition, and auxiliary. If he chooses the “listen” function, the disturbed language is translated into written text. With ‘Repeat’, the artificial voice goes in and with ‘Assistant’ the user can interact directly with the Google Assistant. This is a smart personal assistant for Android, Google Home, iOS, and messenger Google Allo that receives and processes spoken texts.

Relate is now being tested and developed in English with selected people. To do this, Google searches for people who want to participate in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. You have to http://g.co/ProjectRelate Fill out a form. Then Google approaches the selected people and presents them with the application for testing. The project will be extended to other languages ​​at a later time.

Speechless staff

The development was driven by Dmitriy Kanevsky, who has a speech disability and who brought first-hand knowledge to the AI-based solution. Aubrie Lee, a member of the Google Marketing team, is one of the primary users of Relate. Because of muscular dystrophy, people and other applications hardly or don’t understand it at all.

“We know there are many types and forms of speech impairment. We are now testing the app with people with speech impairment in very different ways in order to see how accurate it is and where there is still room for improvement,” said Julie Katio, product manager at Google. Research, “This phase is complete, do we want to make the app available to everyone”.

(End)