World renowned scientist Stephen Hawking will be able to better
communicate his ideas about fundamental physics after the technology
that interprets his speech was upgraded with a new device.
A worsening of the degenerative disease affecting the 71-year-old
physicist had recently reduced him to composing sentences at a rate of
one word a minute.
But now a team from computer hardware firm Intel have created a device
they believe will give the professor the ability to compose five words a
minute - and even increase it to as many as ten, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported.
The scientist has for the past ten years composed his sentences one
letter at a time using a twitch of his cheek to stop a cursor as it
moves across an on-screen keyboard.
After he painstakingly crafts his sentences one word at a time, a
computer attached to his wheelchair reads them out in the distinctive
metallic voice for which he is known.
But recently the motor neuron disease from which he suffers has made his
cheek twitch more difficult to control, significantly slowing the rate
at which one of the world’s sharpest minds is able to communicate with
the outside world.
Intel began working on Professor Hawking’s new device in 2011, after he
asked for help from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore - the man behind
‘Moore’s Law’, which says processing power will double every two years.
The new system uses facial recognition technology to recognise not only
Hawking’s cheek movements, but also twitches from his mouth and eyebrows
to send words to a new speech machine.
Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, told Scientific
American magazine that the upgrade comes after technology finally caught
up with the complicated concepts Hawking wanted to express.
“We’ve built a new, character-driven interface in modern terms that includes a better word predictor,” he said.
“Up to now, [previous] technologies didn’t work well enough to satisfy
someone like Stephen, who wants to produce a lot of information,” he
added.
The new technology offers the professor the opportunity to use two
different signals to express himself, which means he could even
communicate using Morse code which, said Mr. Rattner, ’would be a great
improvement’
Hawking took to his personal blog to tell how grateful he is for the new technology that allows him to continue to speak.
“One’s voice is very important. If you have a slurred voice, people are
likely to treat you as mentally deficient,” he was quoted by the paper
as writing.
“This [computer] synthesiser is by far the best I have heard, because it
varies the intonation, and doesn’t speak like a Dalek. The only trouble
is that it gives me an American accent,” he wrote.