The Speech Accessibility Project is an interdisciplinary initiative with one shared goal: to improve speech technology for people with a range of diverse speech patterns and disabilities. Led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with support from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the project brings together technologists, academic researchers and community organizations to create the diverse speech data needed to make spoken interfaces more accessible for everyone.
Speech recognition is a powerful tool to make technology more accessible in our daily lives, especially for people with disabilities. However, it is not fully accessible for many people with speech disabilities.
Speech recognition is powered by machine learning, and without diverse, representative data, machine learning models cannot learn how to understand a diversity of speech. This project aims to change that by collecting speech samples from paid volunteers representing a diversity of speech patterns to create the dataset needed to more effectively train these machine learning models to better understand a variety of speech patterns.
