klankbrouwerij
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
I recently saw a video from google about a custom voice they created for somebody with ALS but I can't seem to find it online (Does anybody have a link?). Creating custom voices is not yet available on Android though. The latest iOS release (iOS 17) does support creating personalized voices.
ModelTalker [3] is a long-term (research?) project to create custom voices for people with speech disabilities. Their TTS seem to support Android so that might be another option.
[0] https://www.acapela-group.com/ [1] https://www.speakunique.co.uk/ [2] https://vocalid.ai/ [3] https://www.modeltalker.org/
One of your challenges for your business model might be to ensure long-term engagement. Parents might be very interested in your product but might lose interest after a while, leading to high churn rate after a few months. How are you dealing with this? Any tips for other startups who are also selling to parents?
Your app reminds me of Google’s Read Along [0], which is also a reading tutor for young children which one of Google’s offline speech recognition systems (it seems they are currently using an RNN-T encoder-decoder architecture with wordpieces as the base unit). Too bad this app was not marketed properly and translated in many languages, a missed opportunity it seems!
Soapbox Labs [1] is providing a speech recognition API (also offline) for reading tutors and other apps. It might be cheaper to integrate their technology? I believe their ASR technology used to be based (or still is?) on the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit, that might ring a bell ;-)
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [1] https://www.soapboxlabs.com/
Community building will be an important part of your foundation and parents. In our case, we joined the SETBP1 support group on Facebook. It is always heartwarming and comforting to read other peoples and to know that you are not the only one that is in a similar situation. The Facebook group keeps us also updated on recent scientific progress and we were able to join a research study on SETBP1.
I know that having a kid that is unable to communicate is hard. Very hard. When our son was younger he was sometimes very frustated because he could not express himself. But communication is more than speech. Our son is now mainly expressing himself with key word signing (in our case the Dutch variant SMOG) and his speech is gradually improving (at a very slow pace). I hope your daughter will also find a way to properly express herself.
[1] https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/13379/setbp1-diso...
[2] Morgan A, Braden R, Wong MMK, Colin E, Amor D, Liégeois F, Srivastava S, Vogel A, Bizaoui V, Ranguin K, Fisher SE, van Bon BW. Speech and language deficits are central to SETBP1 haploinsufficiency disorder. Eur J Hum Genet. 2021 Aug;29(8):1216-1225.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly
[1] http://johnclilly.com/