Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning make it possible for people to use their voices to operate technology. However, if the systems that provide the outputs don’t have diverse data (voices of all types, strengths, and projections), machine learning models can’t learn how to understand a diversity of speech. A new speech accessibility project led by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with support from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, LSVT Global, and the Davis Phinney Foundation, aims to change that.
Which is why we need you!
As a partner on this project, the Davis Phinney Foundation, along with LSVT Global, hopes to recruit hundreds of people living with Parkinson’s with diverse voices to help the team create the dataset needed to train these machine learning models more effectively.
Listen to our Executive Director Polly Dawkins and board member Kevin Kwok discuss the project at Microsoft’s recent 2023 Ability Summit below.
Find out how you can participate and sign up for an evaluation here.
We are thrilled to be involved with such an incredible team and project, and we hope you’ll jump at the chance too.