What's The Matter With Me? Podcast

What's The Matter With Me? Podcast


Disability Technology

June 28, 2019

Google's Project Euphonia helps disabled people communicate

Five weeks of mayhem, pain and drug withdrawal

ALSO, Five Weeks of Mayhem, Pain &Drug Withdrawal

(Picking up the pieces)

TRANSCRIPT

JOHN HOPPIN: Welcome to the What's The Matter With Me? Podcast Season Three, Episode 10: Disability Technology.

Coming up, Google's Project Euphonia helps disabled people communicate. I have five weeks of mayhem, hell, pain, and drug withdrawal. I'm not kidding. It blew up my life. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the What's The Matter With Me? Podcast. My name is John. I'm 40 years old, husband, father of two, small business owner, radio DJ, podcaster, and I have multiple sclerosis. I made this podcast to share what I'm going through. Past episodes can be downloaded on Apple Podcasts, or from whatsthematterwithme.org, or wherever you get it. I'm not a medical professional. Don't take this for medical advice, and if you need medical advice, ask your healthcare provider.

Crazy five weeks of mayhem. Let's get into it. Pain and drug withdrawal. Ouch. But first, let's recap.

Last episode, Happy Birthday Koko, the whole episode while I was saying it was being filmed by some people trying to make a movie about it, they're gone and it's over. They aren't here anymore. It was a complaining episode. I complained about being in pain, but also discussed being in nature, communing with nature as a pain control method. It's patented. That's my patented method. I talk about the Salt Fat Acid Heat show. I get the name wrong a lot, but I gave that lady an idea. She should do one about butter. I would watch … I watched the other one really. I guess she could do one about whatever she wants. It was the day before Koko's birthday. Check it out. Happy Birthday Koko on Apple Podcasts and whatsthematterwithme.org.

All right. Let's get into it. Google's Project Euphonia, disabled tech, disabled technology. It's going to help disable people speak and interact with voice interactive devices.

Project Euphonia

You know, there's a problem. Disabled people are different. They talk different. So the machines in the house, the Alexa or I don't know what they all are. I have this thing. I just go in a room and yell, "Okay Google," and it talks. Google Home, I guess, or Google Assistant. Whatever. Anything, Siri, all that stuff, it doesn't understand you because you talk different when you're disabled. So you need some solution here, and Google's Project Euphonia is a way that they're trying to bring some sort of solution.

I kind of like cribbed here from an article on theverge.com. Let me give credit where credit is due to James Vincent. May 7th, 2019, Google's Project Euphonia Helps Make Speech Technology More Accessible to People With Disabilities: Improving Speech Recognition Software for People with Voice Impairments. It's basically saying the biggest focus of Euphonia will be collecting more voice data from people with impaired speech. This is intended to remedy the problem of AI bias created by limited training data.

That just means there's not enough recording of disabled people trying to talk, and so they need what they're calling training data, limited training data. That means they don't have any recordings. So they're trying to get people to volunteer, but this brings up an idea of bias in artificial intelligence. This is an example of bias in AI. There's limited training data of people talking who are disabled. So this is a cool project, Project Euphonia. Then furthermore, I'll go down … In addition, the company is working on new interactive AI systems that recognize actions like gestures and facial expressions. So you can just kind of move. People who can't talk or disabled people who are different, maybe they don't want to start talking in a crowded place and have all these people be like, "Oh, look at that." You know? This can help.

So it's called Live Relay and it's supposed to understand gestures,