Apple on Tuesday previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak.
Coming later this year, users with cognitive disabilities can use iPhone and iPad with greater ease and independence with Assistive Access; nonspeaking individuals can type to speak during calls and conversations with Live Speech; and those at risk of losing their ability to speak can use Personal Voice to create a synthesized voice that sounds like them for connecting with family and friends.
Chris Velazco for The Washington Post:
It won’t require any additional apps or accounts, either; just a free software update from Apple.
To people who have full use of their voice, this tool — a feature the company calls Personal Voice — may not seem like much more than a clever curiosity. But for those who can no longer speak with the clarity or confidence they once did, tools like this could help them interact with the world, and the people in it, a little more easily.
While we haven’t gotten to try the feature for ourselves, the company claims an iPhone or iPad can create a sound-alike voice after providing 15 minutes of spoken samples — in this case, a set of randomly chosen voice prompts.
Once that’s done, you can expect a bit of a wait — your device will chew on those samples overnight, after which you’ll be able to type out messages and hear them played back in your voice.
There’s just one more thing to keep in mind: When you build a Personal Voice model, it lives on whatever device you created it on by default. That means you’ll have to go through the training process again on any other device you want to use that model on unless you give explicit permission for it to be shared across devices.
MacDailyNews Take: Even prior to these updates, go to Settings > Accessibility and explore Apple’s many existing accessibility tools – there’s something in there for everybody!
Apple’s accessibility features are simply unmatched. They’re light years ahead of would-be rivals. — MacDailyNews, May 14, 2018
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this is pretty amazing. Well done Apple
A slider for for adjusting the mellifluousness of my Personal Voice, depending on the audience, would be great.
The next level of this feature will be called EchoChamber, and it will interpret the world for you in your opinion, so you can hear and agree with yourself everyday.
My father passed away last September at age 104. In the last 3 years of his life he was nearly deaf, so he stopped the FaceTime chats we had several times a week over many years as we lived 3000 miles apart. As my father’s hearing loss became more severe, I repeatedly emailed Apple software engineers and twice Tim Cook asking and pleading for the addition of voice-to-text “closed captioning” on FaceTime. This would be a trivially easy feature to add since all the code already exists in other Apple apps. Heck, just open up the code to developers, if Apple is too busy with other work. I swear, it could be implemented in hours if not minutes. Crickets. Thanks for your suggestion was the only response I ever received.
Did you consider Zoom or something similar with a chat feature?