If you’ve ever wanted to sound like renowned theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and generally-recognized smartest-man-on-Earth Stephen Hawking, now’s your chance, as the company behind his voice software will now allow you to download the program for free.
One catch: it won’t actually make you any smarter, unfortunately. Sorry.
Nonetheless, Intel has decided to release the assistive context-aware toolkit (ACAT) used by Professor Hawking under a free software license, according to Wired. ACAT is a platform that makes computers more accessible to people with disabilities, and since the toolkit is now open-source, it means that anyone can (theoretically) build an interface just like the one used by the Cambridge researcher to communicate and issue commands to various applications.
As Intel noted on its website, ACAT was designed specifically to make it possible for people with motor neuron diseases and other disabilities to use word prediction, speech synthesis, and keyboard simulation to make it easier to communicate with the world. Using this software, a patient can edit, manage documents, access email, and surf the Web, they explained.
“After Intel deployed the system to Professor Hawking, we turned our attention to the larger community and continued to make ACAT more configurable to support a larger set of users with different conditions,” the company added. “Our hope is that, by open sourcing this configurable platform, developers will continue to expand on this system by adding new user interfaces, new sensing modalities, word prediction and many other features.”
Bad news for Mac users
There are, of course, a few catches (aren’t there always?). For one thing, ACAT was designed solely to work on PCs running Windows 7 or newer, and Wired said that there are currently no plans to release a Mac version of the toolkit. For those lucky PC users, however, the rest of the hardware requirements needed to run the system are “pretty easy to meet,” they added.
Developed in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, ACAT uses visual cues in the user’s face to understand various commands, meaning a computer needs a webcam in order to use it. That might change, as Intel principal engineer Lama Nachman told Wired that they are exploring other input types, including proximity sensors and accelerometer-based ones.
However, the platform isn’t yet ready for the average computer user to download and play with, Nachman added. “The goal of open sourcing this,” the Intel exec told Wired, “is to enable developers to create solutions in the assistive space with ease, and have them leverage what we have invested years of effort in. Our vision is to enable any developer or researcher who can bring in value in sensing, UI, word prediction, context awareness, etc. to build on top of this, and not have to reinvent the wheel since it is a large effort to do this.”
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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