For any digital marketing agency and SEO reseller, moving towards inclusivity and better accessibility should be a priority. Today’s consumer is increasingly concerned with content and products being accessible to a wide range of people, especially those who have been denied access in the past due to any disabilities they may have.
The launch of the Speech Accessibility Project is set to make great strides in helping ensure that speech recognition systems will be able to serve the needs of a broad range of people, regardless of their disabilities or impairments.
What You Need To Know About The Speech Accessibility Project
In partnership with five major tech companies, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has created the Speech Accessibility Project. With help from resources from the tech companies involved in the initiative, university researchers are working to further develop voice recognition technology with the goal of making it more accessible to people with diverse speech impairments, patterns and disabilities.
Machine learning models will be trained to understand a wider range of speech using recorded voice samples from paid volunteers representing diverse speech patterns.
The Importance Of The Speech Accessibility Project Initiative
For many, speech recognition technology is an indispensable part of day-to-day life. From asking Alexa to play your favourite song to using your car’s hands-free, speech-activated calls system, voice recognition is present in many everyday tasks.
Current voice recognition fails to recognise the voices and speech of anyone with a non-standard speech pattern. People with diseases affecting their speech, like Parkinson’s, ALS, Down’s Syndrome and other conditions simply aren’t understood by voice recognition technology and thus cannot use voice-powered features.
Through speech recognition accessibility, everyone can benefit from voice-powered technology, instead of just people who happen to have standard speech patterns.
Well-Known Members Of The Speech Accessibility Project Initiative
Speech recognition is beneficial for so many major companies in the digital space. Since they stand to benefit from greater accessibility, it makes sense that they would all be significantly invested in furthering the availability of speech recognition.
Instead of working apart and competing to be the first to offer enhanced speech recognition, Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are using their combined resources and working with researchers to make incredible strides towards their common goal.
The Effects The Speech Accessibility Project Will Have On Digital Agencies
Whether online shopping or browsing the web to find a service in their area, more and more people rely on voice-driven search to navigate the internet. Whether used to navigate an e-commerce site and make purchases or search the internet to ultimately engage with your clients’ websites, speech recognition already plays a major role in the digital space.
With the Speech Accessibility Project, more people in your clients’ target audience will have access to the online space and, as a result, have access to your client. As the project progresses and technology advances, it’s safe to say that this is only the beginning in terms of accessibility for voice recognition.
The Globital NZ team understands the crucial role played by accessible speech recognition in outsourced digital marketing services. Need to outsource social media management to a white label partner that keeps inclusivity in mind? Globital NZ can help you out! Send us an email at support@globitalmarketing.com to get started.
