El Bruno

Hola!

When you are on holidays you must face the hard choice: run 10K or get into some amazing piece of source code. This one is very interesting, is Stephen Hawking’s speech recognition app developed by INTEL. The app name is Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT), and as you probably already know it was created for Stephen Hawking who is affected by LS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), The main goal of the app is perform a face analysis and generate text based on facial gestures.

The main source code of the app is on GitHub (link). And you can download the code very in a couple of clicks. However I strongly recommend spend some time with the User Guide (link), so you can understand the prerequisites needed and the configuration steps.

The 2 main Options are download the app or download the source code. Previous image shows my choice.

Now I need to find some time to dig into the app, and probably write some posts.

So far, I read and understand that the app has 3 main components:

– The app perform face analysis using a webcam, that’s the entry point to start the “word translation from face gestures”

– There is a predictive engine to help in the Word autocomplete

– There is also a virtual keyboard (?)

I can quickly find 2 of them in the Source Code. And, of course, this is not an “everyone’s app”. The main purpose of put the source code available, is to get support from the community to improve the app. Sai Prasad said:

“Our hope is that, by open sourcing this configurable platform, developers will continue to expand on this system by adding new user interfaces, new sensing modalities, word prediction and many other features”

Saludos @ Malaga

/El Bruno

References

– Stephen Hawking’s speech software is now available for free http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/18/9173041/stephen-hawking-intel-github-speech-software

– Intel just open sourced Stephen Hawking’s speech system and it’s a .NET 4.5 Winforms app that you can try for yourself http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cdndevs/archive/2015/08/14/intel-just-open-sourced-stephen-hawking-s-speech-system-and-it-s-a-net-4-5-winforms-app.aspx

– ACAT Release page https://github.com/01org/acat/releases

– ACAT User Guide https://01.org/sites/default/files/documentation/acat_user_guide.pdf