Fun fact: the latest version of this software uses SwiftKey under the hood - <a href="http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-stephen-hawkings-communication-system/" rel="nofollow">http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-...</a> (Disclaimer: I used to work for SwiftKey)
Bear in mind this project was started around the same time there was a ton of uncertainty around the future of Silverlight and WPF. Alas, one did die, one lives on for now. But nobody knew that at the time, including Intel, or apparently Microsoft. WinForms has never faced any forward compatibility uncertainty so it is a good long-term bet.
WinForms is still a great way to write desktop software if you don't need all the features of WPF, I just started a new project with it and have been really productive.
Discussion of a previous article, focusing on the difficulties during the development of ACAT and tailoring it towards Stephen Hawking: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686757" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686757</a>
To everyone who's interested and programming and are thinking; what should I do/program? I'm sure there are a lot of small things or applications you can do to help other people in need. See it as a learning experience and something that might have a huge impact in other peoples life, how's that for a motivator for something to do? Kudos and respect to all people behind this project and to Stephen Hawking himself.
My mom had ALS, and used single-switch input for a while, after typing and writing on paper weren't possible. She wrote out little notes about what she was thankful for, prayers, practical messages (she had Type 1 diabetes, and told folks her insulin doses), and recipes this way. Eventually she had to switch to giving messages to a human holding a letter board by looking towards them for 'yes' and away for 'no'--cameras or Hawking's infrared-laser-based system weren't really feasible.<p>We looked at some software called EZ Keys from a company called Words Plus. (I don't think she used it specifically, at least for long--I know she used another program, a DOS-based one called Living Better that ran in 40-col. mode that I can't anything about on the Internet.) EZ keys looked more or less like Intel's thing -- scan rows, scan items in a row, completions/predictions over at left. It even had an option to use a frequency-sorted keyboard like the Intel one, with the common letters pushed to the top left (since those are the first rows/cols to be scanned). Hawking apparently used EZ Keys, so it's possible the Intel folks intentionally gave their thing a similar interface to make the transition easy.<p>It is worth remembering that no user cares if it's WinForms or whatever. Some folks might like a nicer voice if they haven't gotten used to theirs like Hawking ;), but the main concern is just getting the message across. Intel seems to have worked on the right stuff: better prediction (Presage <a href="http://presage.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://presage.sourceforge.net/</a>, which looks interesting) and context-sensitive controls. The infrared-laser-based input method sounds cool, too.<p>This is a neat space: an optimization/prediction problem where improvements can be a significant help to someone. (There are also practical optimizations that don't have much to do with the general word-prediction problem: sometimes people have to say things about their care, food, etc., or generic 'hi' and 'bye', and it's good if those are fast.) A Web page or Chrome extension can do a lot--how close can you get to smoothly operating the Web with just the spacebar? the arrow keys and Enter? or plain old typing, but slowed down and using 0-9 for completions?<p>I've heard that nowadays, people with communication trouble and enough movement use text-to-speech on mobile gadgets with their nifty and highly refined predictive input and that's awesome.
Is there Hawking's speech synthesis at all (there was an article that his voice is based on some hardware device <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voice/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voic...</a> )? I understand it's "just" a "navigation" system (replacing the mouse and keyboard with the facial movement virtual key). If it's so, the title (the "<i>speech</i> system") is misleading.<p>The project also doesn't use SwiftKey but<p><a href="https://github.com/01org/acat" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/01org/acat</a><p>"Presage, an intelligent predictive text engine created by Matteo Vescovi."
If anyone is considering downloading this to use his voice to annoy your best friend John with things like "Hello, my name is Steven Hawking. The universe is big, but not as big as John's mother.", let it be known that this software doesn't sound like Hawking.
Presage is great, but to clarify some other comments - it doesn't involve any specific dataset, like SwiftKey - it simply does nice smoothed predictions when given a large database of n-grams (groups of words) and their frequencies. It's fairly easy to chop up a corpus into n-grams using NLTK or other tools, and there's a good port for Python called Pressagio.<p>My startup Spoken - <a href="http://spokenaac.com" rel="nofollow">http://spokenaac.com</a> - uses n-gram predictions to help users with aphasia or other language disorders speak. The user interface challenges aren't quite as intense as Stephen Hawking's binary input, but it's an interesting field if you're into design and big data.
Now security researchers will analyze the code to find vulnerabilities to exploit Stephen Hawking's speech system. Next headline Stephen Hawing's voice sounds like Justin Bieber's voice, lol.
The code in the GitHub repository [1] is pretty interesting to look around in.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/01org/acat" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/01org/acat</a>
Does it make sense to be more aggressive in predicting by giving the user a second level from which to choose? For example, if he types 'b', then it could offer to type 'black' or 'black hole'.<p>On the iPad, for example, if I type 'f', I get shown 'for', then if I accept, I always see 'example' and 'instance'.