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Lara Cowell

How Intel Gave Stephen Hawking a Voice - 0 views

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    Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, ALS patient, uses an Intel microprocessor which enables him to speak. Hawking irreversibly lost speech function in 1985 as a result of a tracheotomy. Since his hands are too weak to type, Hawking uses a single cheek muscle to control the device. The device uses an adaptive word predictor from London startup SwiftKey which allows Hawking to select a word after typing a letter. Intel worked with SwiftKey, incorporating many of Hawking's documents into the system, so that, in some cases, he no longer needs to type a character before the predictor guesses the word based on context. The new version of Hawking's user interface (now called ACAT, after Assistive Contextually Aware Toolkit) includes contextual menus that provide Hawking with various shortcuts to speak, search or email; and a new lecture manager, which gives him control over the timing of his delivery during talks. It also has a mute button, a curious feature that allows Hawking to turn off his speech synthesizer.
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