Tech giants invest in UIUC's Speech Accessibility Project

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign joins tech’s largest forces: Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft along with other non-profit partners for a new Speech Accessibility Project. This research initiative will aim to make voice recognition technology more useful for people with a range of diverse speech patterns and disabilities. 

“Speech interfaces should be available to everybody, and that includes people with disabilities. This task has been difficult because it requires a lot of infrastructure, ideally the kind that can be supported by leading technology companies, so we’ve created a uniquely interdisciplinary team with expertise in linguistics, speech, AI, security, and privacy to help us meet this important challenge,” said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at U of I and the project lead. 

Read more on this innovative project here.