News

Open Voice Factory was on TV! Disruptive Tech TV

A few months ago in November, Open Voice Factory was featured on Disruptive Tech TV. This is the first UK 24/7 technology TV channel covering  technology news and events worldwide. Open Voice Factory applied to be on their Disruptive Pitch TV show. Described as a sort of Dragon’s Den, it’s an online TV program for the UK’s most aspiring technology entrepreneurs, startups and emerging companies to pitch themselves to a panel of judges for the ultimate prize to a chance to keynote at the Cloud Expo Europe 2017 at ExCeL in London.

The competition was fierce; Open Voice Factory was up against but thanks to Joe, the Open Voice Factory’s designer, presenting a fantastic pitch on the day, we actually won the round! Upon winning the round, Open Voice Factory was then invited to the Disruptive Pitch Final  for a few months time. The final was actually held last week at Cloud Expo Europe 2017.

For those not in the know, Cloud Expo Europe is THE only conference to attend if you are anyway involved in the cloud technology sector. The event is huge with industry visionaries and leaders attending. What’s more all the Disruptive Pitch finalists had the opportunity to network with major technology vendors and partners before and after the scheduled event.  It was an unmissable opportunity for  Open Voice Factory and eQuality Time to get noticed and start building awareness

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The conference was incredible, hoards of people everywhere listening to keynote speakers from Google, Twitter and even the Ministry of Defense. There was a total of nine finalists all battling it out to be the overall winner of Disruptive Pitch. Once again, Joe gave it his all and he must have done something right because Open Voice Factory came third overall!

Here’s what Joe said about the experience “I was pleased that we even won our round, so to come third feels like a great achievement and I’m confident that Open Voice Factory will continue to grow and help more and more people all over the world.

If you would like to watch Joe giving it his all  in the first round and blowing the judges away with his fantastic pitch for Open Voice Factory, then make sure you watch the episode here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE5M2TsLO1k

We’ve all been really impressed here with Joe’s pitching skills, show your support and comment below!

How to be an Everyday Tech Hero Webinar

Last week, our Open Voice Factory designer, Joe,  was kindly invited to be a panelist on the NT100 webinar.  It was hosted by  Anne Radl who is the Nominet Trust Programme Development Manager; Anne was a fantastic host and let everyone have their equal say.

As explained on their website (http://www.nominettrust.org.uk), Nominet Trust is the UK’s leading tech for good funder and is for the 4th year in a row running the NT100. NT100 is a celebration of the 100 most inspiring social innovations using digital technology to drive social change around the world. This year, the 2016 NT100 gives special recognition to ‘Everyday Tech Heroes’ — the inspirational people who have first-hand experience of the challenges they are tackling with tech.

Here is the full list of the other Everday Tech Heroes who also featured on the panel. In a weird coincidence, whilst Joe was taking part in the webinar he was actually in the same building as Lise Pape, another panelist!

  • Lise Pape, Walk With Path
  • Joe Reddington, Open Voice Factory
  • Racheael Wallach, Disrupt Disability
  • Taita Ngetich, Illuminum Greehouses
  • Nikhill Nair, M-KOPA Solar
  • Radha Ahlstrom-Vij, WeFarm
  • Lee Mannion, Pioneers Post

The Open Voice Factory is extremely flattered to be one of the 100 featured  as the competition was fierce. The 100 selected were subjected to a three-month period of research and public nominations, and then the shortlisted projects were reviewed by a panel of organisations including: Big Lottery Fund, Cancer Research UK, Comic Relief, Nominet, Oxfam, Telefonica O2 and Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. Eek!  You can also check out the full 100  social enterprises featured here http://socialtech.org.uk/nominet-trust-100/2016/

 

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The webinar was another fantastic opportunity that came from being included in the NT100 2016, and Joe really enjoyed giving the webinar. The panelists tell their stories on how they were inspired  to be start a social venture, and then they go further on how they actually managed to begin these projects and start making real differences in the lives of many. We’re excited to see the output that comes from the fantastic content that was produced in the webinar!

The whole webinar is a great listen and extremely insightlful.  I would highly recommend listening to the whole thing but if you’re a bit short for time;  tune in from 15 minutes to listen to our programmer, Joe Reddington, talking about how to be an Everyday Tech Hero!

New Project: communication with only audio

I wanted to share small new project with you all.

Our most successful project is The Open Voice Factory. It converts easy-to-use PowerPoint designs into communication aids that can be used by people with speech difficulties.

Like most communication aids, The Open Voice Factory is very visual and works on a grid.  This makes them potentially hard to use for people who have both speech difficulties and visual impairment.

Most makers of communication aids deal with this by adding an ‘audio scanning’ mode to their systems so that people can work out what point of the grid a ‘cursor’ is*. As I described it recently:

The program steps through a list of utterances in a female ‘thinking’ voice, and when one is selected, speaks it in a male ‘speaking’ voice (switch genders for a female target users).

When you think about it, that description doesn’t need a grid at all. In fact, the grid and much of the rest of the system just forces these users to live with the effects of design decisions made for people with very different needs.

So we’ve started work on an audio-only communication aid. It will use the same approach as The Open Voice Factory:

  • A user edits a template (Word, or an open format)
  • The template is uploaded and the website gives the user a URL
  • The user uses the URL on any internet connected device.

But we’ll remove all the parts that make things harder.

I’ve spent a few hours working out if it can be done, and the current code is here.  As always, comments, testers, and coders welcome 🙂

How we ask for money

This is the set of times we’ve asked for money for things we want to do.
It gives us information about what we have tried to do so far,  and that can help us decide things in future.
We share it because it might help people who have the same plans.  Also, people who like us can look at this table and say “I think ‘This person’ would give you money to do ‘This Thing'”.    If you are one of those people and you have any ideas, please get in touch.
Funder Applicable Project Amount Date/Number Status Type of Application
PCC TooManyCooks £2,000.00 1 Funded Form
Unltd SuperTitle £6,000.00 3 Denied Form
London Catalyst – Special Interest Grant The Open Voice Factory £2,500.00 4 Funded Interview (after form)
National Lottery: Awards for all SuperTitle £8,995.00 5 Funded Form
Inclusive Tech Prize The Open Voice Factory £2,000.00 6 Funded Presentation (after form)
Awesome Foundation The Open Voice Factory £1,000.00 7 Funded Presentation (after form)
Post code comuniter TooManyCooks £4,250.00 8 Denied Form
Inclusive Tech Prize Stage 2 The Open Voice Factory £10,000.00 10 Funded Presentation (after form)
Heritage lottery fund WikiLocalHero £8,345.00 11 Denied Form
ShackletonFoundation SuperTitle £10,000.00 12 Missed Deadline Form
Heritage lottery fund WikiLocalHero £8,345.00 12 Denied again Form
Bethnal Green Ventures The Open Voice Factory £15,000.00 13 Abandoned Form
Unltd The Open Voice Factory £6,000.00 14 Abandoned Form
Grants for the Arts TooManyCooks £15,000.00 15 Denied Form
Inclusive Tech Prize Stage 3 The Open Voice Factory £50,000.00 16 Funded Presentation
Google Grants for Disability The Open Voice Factory ??? 07/09/2015 Denied Online Form
Paul Hamlyn SuperTitle £33,444.00 28/10/2015 Denied Form
Haley Stewart SuperTitle £33,444.00 13/11/2015 Denied Form
Tudor Supertitle £25,000.00 11/12/2015 Denied Letter
Trust for London 10000 Children £33,444.00 04/02/2016 Denied Form
Open technology fund The Open Voice Factory £56,000.00 18/02/2016 Denied Form
Paul Hamlyn (resubmission) SuperTitle £33,444.00 11/07/2016 Waiting Form
Haley Stewart (resubmission) SuperTitle £33,444.00 11/07/2016 Denied Form
DRILL The Open Voice Factory £37,400.00 26/07/2016 Denied Form
Guys and St Thomases Trust Superhero Cyborgs £34,191.00 06/09/2016 Denied Form
Baily Thomas Charitable Fund Domesday! £4,600.00 27/09/2016 Denied Letter
Hackaday Prize The Open Voice Factory £1,000.00 30/09/2016 Denied Webpage
Grants for the Arts (resubmission) TooManyCooks £15,000.00 01/11/2016 Denied Form
Children in Need Supertitle £8,000.00 10/03/2016 Denied Form/Phone call
What we notice is this:
We do much much better when the ‘ask’ is in person, rather than by form.  That might mean that we should work much harder on our forms.
When we first started, we asked for small bits of money for things and some of those did well. When we got a little bigger, we asked for much more money and that did less well. Maybe we thought we grew faster than we did.
I think we will have more ‘wins’ if we ask for slightly smaller bits of money, and if we work hard to find things that need us to ask in person.
(written with xkcd Simple Writer)

Open Voice Factory celebrated as one of the world’s 100 most inspiring examples of tech for good

Nominet Trust, the UK’s leading tech for good funder, has named The Open Voice Factory in the 2016 NT100 – a global celebration of this year’s 100 most inspiring social innovations using digital technology to drive social change around the world.

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NT100 plays a valuable role each year in inspiring those with the influence and resources to accelerate the adoption of tech for social good.  It brings together entrepreneurs, innovators, NGOs, charities, technologists and others to share knowledge, experiences and skills to introduce social change on a global scale. Projects featured in the NT100 have wide-ranging purposes, from those determined to democratise access to quality education and healthcare, to those connecting minority communities and evoking empathy.

Following a global call for nominations earlier this year The Open Voice Factory was selected by a judging panel of tech and charity experts in recognition of its work. The Open Voice Factory provides free software that helps give a voice to people with communication difficulties. The Open Voice Factory aid displays a set of icons that represent words, which a user can look through to find the word they want to express and, once selected, their device will say this word for them.

This year the NT100 gives special recognition to ‘Everyday Tech Heroes’ — the inspirational people who have first-hand experience of the challenges they are tackling with tech. Joe Reddington is one of the co-founders behind the Open Voice Factory and Joe’s younger brother uses AAC devices; “My little brother’s life was changed by one of those tools,” says Joe, “But it was £5000. The devices break down a lot, and the supply is not sufficient.” The aim with The Open Voice Factory is to solve these issues and make AAC devices available across the globe.

Co-founders Joe Reddington and Kate McCallum met at an independent specialist college where she worked and where Joe’s brother went to school. Joe and Kate both have younger brothers who use AAC devices, and they met when Kate was working at an independent specialist college, where Joe’s brother went to school. When Kate created the world’s first Creative Commons pageset, CommuniKate, Joe put together a demo where users could try it out. The popularity of this demo was unprecedented. Seeing this, Joe decided to spin the demo out into The Open Voice Factory, a program that can be used with any pageset, CommuniKate or otherwise.

 

Vicki Hearn, Director of Nominet Trust said: “In this, the fourth year of the NT100, it is truly humbling to see so many remarkable people from all walks of life embracing digital technology as a force for social good. We hope The Open Voice Factory’s well deserved inclusion in the 2016 NT100 provides a valuable stepping-stone for their inspiring example of tech for good.”

“With a bright idea, the right tech tools and a powerful desire to change the status quo, everyone has the potential to make a stand against the world’s most pressing social challenges. The NT100 seeks to champion the pioneers doing just that, in the hope that it inspires others to follow in their footsteps.”

As part of the 2016 NT100, The Open Voice Factory is standing shoulder to shoulder with other innovative ventures such as EVA Park – a virtual environment to help those with aphasia recover communication skills; Hand Talk – a Brazilian virtual interpreter that translates between spoken languages and sign language; Disrupt Disability – which has created the world’s first open source wheelchair designs; BraveMind – a virtual reality therapeutic game that supports those recovering from PTSD; and Mine Kafon Drone – an airborne drone for detecting and removing unexploded landmines in communities trying to rebuild after conflict.

The 2016 NT100 was selected from 700 projects discovered this year through a combination of research and public nomination. Shortlisted projects were reviewed by Nominet Trust and a panel of partner organisations including: Big Lottery Fund, Cancer Research UK, Comic Relief, Nominet, Oxfam, Telefonica O2 and Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

The 2016 NT100 projects are hosted on the Social Tech Guide (http://socialtech.org.uk/nominet-trust-100/2016), the world’s largest interactive database of tech for good, which now showcases almost 1700 ventures.

A Mod for Ryan

SpecialEffect is a charity that targets something which often gets overlooked – people with physical disabilities have lives beyond simply ‘being disabled’ and want to enjoy themselves. We provide the specialist technology, advice and support for everyone to benefit from the fun, friendship and inclusion of video games, leisure technology and communication.

We know there’s no one-size-fits-all way of doing this. So we visit people to find out exactly what they want to play, and what they need to play it. We’ll then match, modify or create equipment to lend to them, and give support so they can get the best out of it.

One of the many ways that we might do this is through custom modifications of controllers.

This modded controller is for one of our friends Ryan. His muscular dystrophy means he has hardly any movement in his fingers, so he can’t use a standard controller. He’d like to be able to play FIFA on the PS3, so our team worked with him and found some small but controllable movements in his hands and body.

He had small movements in one of his fingers, but they were too weak to operate a standard stick. Our plan was to replace the tiny spring within the body of the stick itself so it would take less effort to move.

We also discovered that Ryan could operate three lightweight accessibility switches – one with his foot and two with his hands. By further modding the controller, these switches could be used to replace the Start, Cross and Circle buttons.

So we set about cannibalising the PS3 controller to replace the springs and add sockets for the three switches.

First we removed the screws and the rear, then the PCB.

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Then we unclipped the inner section of the controller.

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Time to remove the rumble functions to make room for the jack sockets in the handgrips.

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Next we removed the left analog stick (the one Ryan needs to be made lighter) and eased back the securing tags of the metal casing to open it up.

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We then swapped a lighter gauge spring into the analog stick, and reassembled it.
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On to the switch sockets. With this type the PS3 controller the contacts under each button are located on a sheet of plastic. So we traced these contacts back to the front of the PCB and found the tracks that we wanted to solder onto.

We removed the protective layer covering the tracks. Great care was taken at this point to not scratch away any area outside the track or this could cause issues later on.

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We then soldered light gauge single core connection wire to these points.

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Then we drilled holes in the handgrips for the jack sockets…

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…glued them in position with a hotglue gun…

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…reinstalled the PCB and soldered the wires to the sockets.

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Then we replaced the cover, and tested the sockets with the lightweight switches.

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All good to go, and now Ryan’s gaming again J

The modifications that we do are part of our service that we offer to people with disabilities who would like to enjoy video games. Our teams consist of technologists, games experts, and occupational therapists who work closely and intensively with the people we help, identifying abilities and movements they have that can be used to help or in place of a button press or stick movement.

In Ryan’s case, as with many people who have progressive conditions, we’ll be there to offer help again if his abilities change and he wants to carry on gaming.

We don’t charge for any of our help.

Find out more about our charity at at http:www.specialeffect.org.uk

 

Open Voice Factory has updated

Following some fairly intensive work by testers (thank you everbody!), we’ve updated the Open Voice Factory as well as its CommuniKate templates.

This has fixed one bug made one design change, and added one feature.

The bug was relatively simple – the colour wasn’t been read from some PowerPoint cells correctly, which meant that they would take on the colour of whatever that cell had been on the previous page.

The feature was pretty simple as well, we added capital letters to the pagesets CommuniKate 12 and CommuniKate 20.

The design change was a little more involved.    Some AAC functions are a little more complex than others.  So while linking from a grid cell to another page is easy – making a cell clear the message window is a bit more difficult.

In the Open Voice Factory we get around this by using the hyperlink field that PowerPoint has for every object.  By putting special text inside that field, you could make the resulting communication app do just about anything (technically we are calling Javascript functions).

We used to have special commands that looked like this:

special::clear()

unhelpfully, it turned out that this format doesn’t work with older version of PowerPoint, so we’ve completely rewritten the engine.  The up to date CommuniKate templates now have special commands that look like this:

ovf(clear())

These changes are now up on GitHub and live at the Open Voice Factory website.  They are also backward compatible – old designs that you have been testing will still work (although they will still show the colour bug, and they will only work on newer versions of PowerPoint).

Next on our todo list to to produce some instruction videos that go into the topic of special commands in more detail.

Mozfest

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eQuality Time will be running a design session at Mozfest in a few weeks. We’re very excited about this.  Mozfest is an astonishingly exciting place.   Joe wrote this about it a little while ago:

The easiest way of explaining Mozfest is this. There are 900 people there. You can ask any one of them ‘What’s the awesome thing you are doing?’ and *they know the answer*.

Our session is based on a workshop we’ve done previously at Border Sessions.  The concept of the session is to get attendees to explore the issues around AAC  as a case study into the ‘extreme’ end of digital privacy.

The top level session description is this:

Electronic Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems enable indi- viduals with severe speech impairment to verbally communicate their needs, often using Text-to-Speech technology as their “Voices”. Such devices are designed to give communication impaired people greater independence and improved opportunities of social integration.

However, these devices represent an extreme of the privacy spectrum. When all of your utterances of ‘scaffolded’ and interpreted by care staff and when your speech device contains your thoughts, things you wanted to say but never got the chance, and all of the words you’ve said, there is a very real sense that you have no personal privacy at all.

Our session will explore these issues thought the design of a privacy iconography management for users that are pre-literate – a group of symbols that denote terms around personal data.

….and unfortunately we are unable to give any more details without spoiling the session for the attendees.  So here are some photos of the session we ran at Bordersessions.

 

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The Open Voice Factory and the case for academics

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We’ve made our hope for The Open Voice Factory fairly clear in terms of end users: free communication, wherever you are in the world.  However, I thought it was worth taking some time to lay down the strong intellectual case for why it can be a game changer for academics as well.

I used to be a university researcher looking at AAC issues. That design experience stayed with me.  In many ways The Open Voice Factory is setup to provide the tools that I wished I had.  There’s at least one project that would have been nine months shorter if we’d have had this in our back pocket.

Let me give you the headlines for why you should be using The Open Voice Factory in your academic projects.

 

Rapid Prototyping – including machine generation!

The Open Voice Factory takes in PowerPoint documents and converts them to AAC communication systems. This makes it  fast. You can see the speed in real time in the video below.  This makes it really easy to get a research page set off the ground in a hurry.  It also makes it fast to change and easy for groups to work on a new pageset together by using track changes and the rest of Microsoft’s teamwork functions.   Regardless of where you are in the AAC world!

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We use the python library Python-pt to read the PowerPoint files.  This means that if you are interested in easily generating content, you can write the code to make your own templates, review them by humans, and the send them into the factory to be finalised.

Starting with a pageset

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The Open Voice Factory makes use of CommuniKate, the open AAC pageset.  CommuniKate is creative commons license, which means that you can use it as a starting point for any academic project you like – rather than have to create a pageset from scratch.

Trigger JavaScript within the browser

At the design level, you design you templates so that they execute pieces of JavaScript when compiled into a speech aid.

Nava Tintarev and I defined four catagories of automatic construction of utterances back in 2011,  here is what we wrote for the first two.

Inferred input

Inferred input is defined as utterances that can be generated from examination of previous user utterances. Thus, if a device registered the phrase “Hello Mary” and later “Thank you Mary” it would be reasonable to deduce that the user had spent some time with an individual called Mary and so the phrase “Today I spent time with Mary” could be added to the list of available phrases (later, of course, becoming “Yesterday I spent time with Mary”,

Network-based input

Network-based input is defined as new utterances that can be determined by access to information over the Internet, or some other information portal. An example is talking about the weather – phrases such as “It’s very warm today”, “It’s going to rain tomorrow”, and “It snowed on Sunday!”. Also included are observations about recent media: “On YouTube I watched a video called ‘the Four Chord Song’ ”.

Almost all of those examples are extremely difficult to perform with mainstream AAC devices.  They are also trivial to put together for a programmer using the Open Voice Factory.

This is partly because the code is open – you can simply clone and change the relevant code from the GitHub repository and just insert the code that does what you want. It’s also because you can, effectively, embed your own JavaScript functions within the PowerPoint documents that you create for The Open Voice Factory.  Full control of the content using a mature programming language.

 Impact

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A particular buzzword for the UK, if you use The Open Voice Factory for our AAC research, you might write some code, maybe contribute some pagesets as part of the project. That code will be merged into the Factory’s trunk, and will go towards helping people long before the journal reviewers get around to looking at your paper.  You’ll have made lives better, isn’t that why you got into research?

 

 

eQuality Time releases The Open Voice Factory to public beta!

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Today eQuality Time released The Open Voice Factory to public beta.

The Open Voice Factory is a free, open source tool for creating communication apps.

Anyone can create an aid by editing a PowerPoint template to add their one pages or utterances. When you upload your template to the factory, it will create a working communication aid for you.

The resulting programs run on any platform, from tablets to laptops to phones, without installation or complex setup.

Everything we make is free. That’s free as in ‘don’t pay for it’ and free as in speech. All of our code is freely available on github here and anyone can change or repurpose without having to ask us first. We’re supported by the volunteers who write the code, create the templates and help out all over.

The website lets you play with our demos, have a go at creating your own, and find out how you can help.

We’ve produced a set of YouTube videos covering the basics of editing. We’ve added the first one below.

(for those who’ve been following the project for a while, The Open Voice Factory is the new version of what we used to called ‘AzuleJoe’)