AAPL Apple Inc

By Katie Deighton 

Dagmar Munn and her husband purchased a smart speaker from Amazon.com Inc. for their home in Green Valley, Ariz. in 2017, seven years after Ms. Munn was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the motor neuron disease more commonly referred to as ALS.

At first the speaker's voice assistant, Alexa, could understand what Ms. Munn was saying. But as her condition worsened and her speech grew slower and more slurred, she found herself unable to communicate with the voice technology.

"I'm not fast enough for it," Ms. Munn said. "If I want to say something like 'Alexa, tell me the news,' it will shut down before I finish asking."

Ms. Munn can't interact with voice assistants such as Alexa because the technology hasn't been trained to understand people with dysarthria, a speech disorder caused by weakening speech muscles. People with a stutter or nonstandard speech caused by hearing loss or mouth cancer can also struggle to be understood by voice assistants.

Approximately 7.5 million people in the U.S. have trouble using their voices, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Julie Cattiau, a product manager in Google's artificial intelligence team, said that group is at risk of being left behind by voice-recognition technology.

Google is one of a number of technology companies now trying to train voice assistants to understand everyone.

Some made investments into voice accessibility after realizing that people with dysarthria -- often a side effect of conditions including cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease or a brain tumor -- may be the group that stands to benefit most from voice-recognition technology.

"For someone who has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair, being able to control their environment with their voice could be super useful to them," said Ms. Cattiau. Google is collecting atypical speech data as part of an initiative to train its voice-recognition tools.

Training voice assistants to respond to people with speech disabilities could improve the experience of voice-recognition tools for a growing group of potential users: Seniors, who are more prone to degenerative diseases, said Anne Toth, Amazon's director of Alexa Trust, a division that oversees the voice assistant's privacy and security policies and features, as well as its accessibility efforts.

Amazon in December announced an Alexa integration with Voiceitt, an Israeli startup backed by Amazon's Alexa Fund that lets people with speech impairments train an algorithm to recognize their own unique vocal patterns. Slated to go live in the coming months, the integration will allow people with atypical speech to operate Alexa devices by speaking into the Voiceitt application.

Apple Inc. said its Hold to Talk feature, introduced on hand-held devices in 2015, already lets users control how long they want the voice assistant Siri to listen for, preventing the assistant from interrupting users that have a stutter before they have finished speaking.

The company is now researching how to automatically detect if someone speaks with a stutter, and has built a bank of 28,000 audio clips from podcasts featuring stuttering to help do so, according to a research paper due to be published by Apple employees this week that was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The data aims to help improve voice-recognition systems for people with atypical speech patterns, an Apple spokesman said. He declined to comment on how Apple may use findings from the data in detail.

Google's Project Euphonia initiative is testing a prototype app that lets people with atypical speech communicate with Google Assistant and smart Google Home products by training software to understand their unique speech patterns. But it's also compiling an audio bank of atypical speech that volunteers -- including Ms. Munn -- contribute to.

Google hopes that these snippets will help train its artificial intelligence in the full spectrum of speech and bring its voice assistant closer to full accessibility, but it isn't an easy task. Voice assistants can recognize most standard speech because users' vocal harmonies and patterns are similar, despite their different accents. Atypical speech patterns are much more varied, which makes them much harder for an artificial intelligence to understand, said Google's Ms. Cattiau.

"As of today, we don't even know if it's possible," she said.

Critics say technology companies have been too slow in addressing the issue of accessibility in voice assistants, which first became available around 10 years ago.

Glenda Watson Hyatt, an accessibility advocate and motivational speaker who has cerebral palsy, said some disability surveys don't report on the prevalence of speech disabilities, so if technology companies "relied on such data to help determine market size and needs, it is obvious why they overlooked or excluded us."

People working in voice accessibility say the technology only relatively recently became sophisticated enough to attempt handling the complexities of nonstandard speech. They also said many technology firms weren't placing so much emphasis on inclusive design when the first voice assistants were being built.

Contributing to projects such as Project Euphonia can also be difficult for people with atypical speech. Ms. Munn says she sometimes finds speaking physically exhausting, but is happy to contribute if it helps teach a voice assistant to understand her.

"It would help me feel normal," she said.

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 24, 2021 12:15 ET (17:15 GMT)

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024