The Voiceitt App: Helping The Speech-Impaired Use Voice-Controlled Tech

Voice controlled digital assistants are increasing in popularity nowadays, with services like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo allowing consumers to basically manage tech gadgets or retrieve useful information just by issuing verbal commands. Normal users tend to take this technology for granted, but for those who deal with impairments in their speech, it could prove a little tricky. Millions of users are speech impaired across the globe, and they often can not make full use of voice controlled digital services because they could not issue the commands properly (or just have a strong foreign accent).

This is where Voiceitt comes in -- the Israel based firm has actually managed to raise about a couple of million dollars in seed funding in order to develop a mobile app that can easily translate speech that is not clearly intelligible into perfectly understandable words. It helps that Voiceitt has gained investment support from Amit Technion, Dreamit Ventures, Quake Capital, Buffalo Angels, and 1,000 Angels, just to name a few. By the way, the firm was co-founded by Danny Weissberg (who is also the chief executive officer) and Stas Tiomkin (also the chief technical officer).

So how exactly does the Voiceitt mobile app works? Well, when a user launches the app, it then asks him to compose and then read short sentences, like those as simple as “close the door” or “I am hungry” phrases. What the apps does then is record the audio reading, and then study the user’s unique pronunciation. For those users with motor disabilities, they can have another person type the sentences for them. 

Once the Voiceitt mobile app masters the user’s speech pattern, it then proceeds to transforming that person’s sentences into standard speech, in the form of either audio or text message. This way, the audio or text messages can easily be picked up by voice controlled apps or devices. Another cool thing about the app is that it can be useful too in helping the speech impaired interact with other people in real life.

According to Weissberg, the idea for the Voiceitt mobile app was inspired by his grandmother, who had suffered a stroke and consequently began having speech impairments. The company CEO then realized how normal people easily take speech for granted, and then he set out to develop an app that could help the speech impaired talk or interact better, not only with other people, but also with voice controlled apps and gadgets.