CP Joins the ‘Speech Accessibility Project’
CP Unlimited has made a concerted push to integrate and incorporate assistive technologies throughout our programs and settings. From our long-standing participation in Google’s Project Euphonia to our most recent work outlined below, the Agency is committed to advancing tools and tech that contributes to the achievement of a fulfilling life for the people we support and a more efficient use of time and energy for the dedicated caretakers and direct support professionals on the CP team.
The Speech Accessibility Project at the Beckmann Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign works to collect speech samples representing a diversity of speech patterns and uses the recordings to create a private, de-identified dataset for training machine learning models to better understand a variety of speech patterns, thereby improving voice recognition technologies to understand people with diverse speech patterns and disabilities.
The project is recruiting U.S. and Puerto Rican adults with cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s and those who have had a stroke. Funded by Big Tech companies Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, organizers partnered with CP Unlimited- alongside ADAPT Community Network and the Cerebral Palsy Foundation- to contribute recordings and recommendations.
“The Speech Accessibility Project is an important step forward for the field as well as CP Unlimited,” said Sebastian Chittilappilly, chief of programs at CP Unlimited. “By informing the programs and devices that help people with cerebral palsy communicate with caregivers and other loved ones, these technologies can be refined to help the greatest number of persons with disabilities.”
Marilyn Ladewig, CP Unlimited’s speech language pathology supervisor, said the project will make a huge difference for those with CP.
“Being understood by technology can mean the difference between paying a bill easily or calling 911 with your voice,” she said. “As a speech language pathologist, having automatic speech recognition work for the developmentally different population would mean more and better communication for my patients.”
