ISRAEL 
HIGH-TECH & INVESTMENT REPORT

from the January 2003 issue


Seeing Speech a Solution for Deafness

For severely partially or totally deaf people, lip-reading may be the only possible means of everyday communication. Learning to lip-read enables one to take part in everyday communication with family, friends and colleagues, enabling participation and conversations which one might previously have avoided. Lip-reading helps to overcome the isolation which can all too easily result from a loss of hearing. The technology which converts the spoken word such as is used in the course of a telephone conversation has found application in a new product offered by a young Israeli firm SpeechView Ltd. It is a start-up founded in August 2000, after being incubated by M-Insight, an Israeli based information technology company. Three years ago Nachshon Margalit became interested in the field and was startled when he realized that a project manager, whom he had hired for his company, was hard of hearing. Though Margalit had earned a doctorate in Information Technology, he had previously not been faced with the challenge of aiding a person to overcome deafness. That marked the beginning of an intensive research and development effort, that led to the creation of software, which in combination with a cell phone, allows hard of hearing or totally deaf individuals, to carry on normal conversations.

"General solutions for the hard of hearing focused on improving hearing, either by mechanical or surgical means. Since most hard of hearing individuals rely on lip reading to help them understand the spoken word, it was in this area where we sought a solution," explains Margalit in his company's office in Tel-Aviv.

Raising the level of lip reading is achieved by creating cued speech which can be thought of as enhanced lip-reading -- signs are made around the face that appear on the computer screen to provide vital additional information about some of the phonemes being uttered. Margalit points out that lip-reading is usually a practical means of communication, but is not perfect-- typically, a person who is lip-reading only recognizes 30 per cent of the words being uttered. For example, b and p cannot be told apart -- and thus ``cued speech'' indicates which phoneme is being uttered. The enhancement of the moving lips is achieved with algorithms, and in the final software, allows for the deaf person to maintain, nearly seamlessly, a conversation which begins with the speech of the caller and its understanding by the handicapped person, as he visually reads the conversation that has been converted into a lip readable format. The software product trade named LipCcell, is installed in the user's computer and connected with a cable to a cellphone. When the deaf person receives a call, the software translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three-dimensional animated face on the computer, whose lips move in real time synch with the voice allowing the receiver of the call to lip read.

Cellcom, Israel's largest mobile phone operator sensed a major business opportunity and assumed sole distributorship for Israel. On a global scale, there are 24 million hard of hearing individuals who could be helped with LipCell. At $125 a set, the price would not seem to be an obstacle.



Reprinted from the Israel High-Tech & Investment Report January 2003

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