Project – An AI voice based email system for visually impaired

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.0 Introduction

We have seen that the introduction of Internet has revolutionized many fields. Internet has made life of people so easy that people today have access to any information they want easily. Communication is one of the main fields highly changed by Internet.

E-mails are the most dependable way of communication over Internet, for sending and receiving some important information. But there is a certain norm for humans to access the Internet and the norm is you must be able to see. But there are also differently able people in our society who are not gifted with what you have. There are some visually impaired people or blind people who can’t see things and thus can’t see the computer screen or keyboard.

A survey has shown that there are more than 240 million visually impaired people around the globe. That is, around 240 million people are unaware of how to use Internet or E-mail. The only way by which a visually challenged person can send an E-mail is, they have to speak the entire content of the mail to another person (not visually challenged) and then that third person will compose the mail and send on the behalf of the visually challenged person. But this is not a right way to deal with the problem. It is very unlikely that every time a visually impaired person can find someone for help. Although for these reasons the visually impaired people are criticized by our society. So, for the betterment of society and giving an equal status to such especially able people we have come up with this project idea which provides the user with ability to send mails using voice commands without the need of keyboard or any other visual things.

1.1 Interactive Voice Response

Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via a keypad.

In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a company’s host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed.

1.2 Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is the inter-disciplinary sub-field of computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as “automatic speech recognition” (ASR), “computer speech recognition”, or just “speech to text” (STT).

1.3        Speech to Text

The system acquires speech at run time through a microphone and processes the sampled speech to recognize the uttered text. The recognized text can be stored in a file. We are developing this on Android platform using Eclipse workbench. Our speech to-text system directly acquires and converts speech to text. It can supplement other larger systems, giving users a different choice for data entry. A speech-to-text system can also improve system accessibility by providing data entry options for blind, deaf, or physically handicapped users. Speech recognition system can be divided into several blocks: feature extraction, acoustic models database which is built based on the training data, dictionary, language model and the speech recognition algorithm. Analog speech signal must first be sampled at time and amplitude axes, or digitized. Samples of the speech signal are analyzed in even intervals. This period is usually 20ms because the signal in this interval is considered stationary. Speech feature extraction involves the formation of equally spaced discrete vectors of speech characteristics. Feature vectors from training database are used to estimate the parameters of acoustic models. The acoustic model describes properties of the basic elements that can be recognized. The basic element can be a phoneme for continuous speech or word for isolated words recognition.

1.4 Text to Speech

Converting text to voice output using speech synthesis techniques. Although initially used by the blind to listen to written material, it is now used extensively to convey financial data, e-mail messages, and other information via telephone for everyone.

Text-to-speech is also used on handheld devices such as portable GPS units to announce street names when giving directions. Our Text-to-Speech Converter‖ accepts a string of 50 characters of text (alphabets and/or numbers) as input. In this, we have interfaced the keyboard with the controller and defined all the alphabets as well as digits keys on it. The speech processor has an unlimited dictionary and can speak out almost any text provided at the input most of the times. Hence, it has an accuracy of above 90%. It is a micro controller-based hardware coded in Embedded C language. Further research is to be done to optimize various methods of inputting the text i.e. Reading the text using optical sensor and converting it to speech so that almost all sorts of physical challenges faced by the people while communicating are overcome.

1.5 Purpose of the Project

This project proposes a python-based application, designed specifically for visually impaired people. This application provides a voice-based mailing service where they could read and send mail on their own, without any guidance through their Email accounts. The VMAIL system can be used by a blind person to access mails easily and adeptly. Hence dependence of visually challenged on other individual for their activities associated to mail can be condensed.

The application will be a python-based application for visually challenged persons using IVR- Interactive voice response, thus sanctioning everyone to control their mail accounts using their voice only and to be able to read, send, and perform all the other useful tasks. The system will ask the user with voice commands to perform certain action and the user will respond to it.

The main advantage of this system is that use of keyboard is completely eliminated, the user will have to respond through voice only.

1.6 Motivation

It is estimated that nearly 285 million people in the world are visually impaired and idea is to facilitate suitable communication system for them. This reason was driving force behind developing given system. One of the major disadvantages of existing system is that all operations are based on mouse click events and keyboard. Operations depend completely on types of clicks specified by idea. Also sometimes remembering keyboard shortcut is difficult. The extent of existing system is limited for blind and visually impaired people. There is high need of developing a proper system which curbs all the above drawbacks and turn into a simple system. Idea focuses on providing basic functionalities like compose, send, receive E-mail along with advance features like voice-based operation, search mail, provision for voice as well as text-based email with added ease and simplicity. Related Work Interaction of the users to the system earlier was based on Screen reader-based technology and also system based on mouse click based operations were in for every operation there is associated mouse click for example to compose email let say to left clicks. Therefore, interaction with the system is tough also there is need to keep events in mind. This paper focuses on developing an email system which helps blind people to use communication services. The system based in IVR is used, major idea is to discard keyboard and use of mouse operation. Internet is rich source of knowledge and information; blind people face difficulties in accessing text-based material. The idea is to develop audio feedback based virtual environment like screen reader, text to speech, etc. Voice mail architecture helps blind people to access info. in form of audio, text, self-read system. Idea focuses on helping visually impaired and illiterate people to access technology by reducing cognitive load. Decision making depends on eyesight and everything that happens or appears.

Project – An AI voice based email system for visually impaired