Use your eyes to speak
Look to Speak is a mobile app that empowers users with speech and motor impairment. This app enables people with speech and motor disorders to select phrases through their eyes, which will then be spoken aloud by their phone speaker. Made under the Start with One Project, it focuses on experiments started by one person to ‘make something impactful’ for society.
Communication aid
Look to Speak is an impressive communication tool that could greatly help people who suffer from speech and motor impairments. It allows its users to personalize words and phrases, which allows them to share their authentic voice. However, this handy app is only designed for short messages, and Google doesn’t encourage users to use this as an alternative for fully-equipped communication aid devices.
Users will be required to look left, right, or up to choose from the list of phrases and select the one they would like to say. There will be tons of options in the menu settings that they could also customize. For instance, they could modify each gaze and the direction that will suit the user’s preferences. The guide emphasized the importance of looking left, right, and up to register the gaze accurately.
It contains a sound feedback feature so, users must expect to hear a ‘ping’ sound whenever their gaze is recognized. Most often than not, the eye-tracking is pretty accurate, with only a few errors to come up. However, they never repeat. Google should consider adding head movement mode in its next update to avoid too much eye strain. Doing so can also act as an alternative for eye movement. More so, the user can freely choose the gesture they want to do at their convenience.
For users with speech impairment
Look to Speak is another exceptional language application made by Google that can change the lives of those who have speech and motor disorders. With this, they will not feel left out as they can now easily communicate with the world. However, you should never treat this app as an alternative to communication aid devices as it is only designed to deliver short messages.
