The "Big five" of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta will improve speech recognition for the disabled.

CTOnews.com, October 3 (Xinhua)-- the University of Illinois (UIUC) has announced a speech assistance project with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and non-profit organizations, which aims to improve speech recognition for people with disabilities and various speech patterns not covered by the AI algorithm.

According to reports, the program will help people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and others who affect speech.

Professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson of UIUC said: "speech recognition should be available to everyone, including people with disabilities, and this task has been difficult because it requires a lot of infrastructure, ideally the kind of infrastructure that can be supported by leading technology companies, so we have created a unique interdisciplinary team with expertise in linguistics, voice, artificial intelligence, security and privacy."

CTOnews.com learned that the project would collect voice samples from individuals representing various voice patterns, while UIUC would recruit paid volunteers to contribute voice samples and help create a "private, de-recognizable" data set to train machine learning models. The project will first focus on American English recognition.