Utilising the advances in speech recognition technology paired with a remote respeaking methodology it delivers live captioning within seconds to any internet enabled devices such as an iPad or laptop.
Ai-Live has proven that it is a solution that is effective in improving the lives of Deaf and hearing impaired people using a model that is affordable, reliable and scalable. For more information on Ai-Live please visit http://www.ai-live.com.
Transcript:
Lisa:
I was born deaf, but my family did not realise it. They actually thought that I was hearing, until I did not respond to my parents’ calls. So they tried a test and then they found out that I was born deaf.
Rabia:
I got a cold, like a flu, when I was young. When I was around three years old. And the medicine had one-in-a-thousand side effects. So I was one of the thousands to get the side effects of the medicine, which made me deaf.
Ann:
Literacy for deaf kids has been a problem for years. It’s been one of the huge difficulties that they’ve faced, is a lag in their literacy.
Sally:
It’s just a struggle for them to get all of the information, process it, do all the work at home that they need to do, and understand it all.
John:
Ten thousand children in Australia are deaf, and 85% of those children attend mainstream schools.
Leonie:
In 2006, I was chatting with a student, who herself, was in a mainstream English class. And she had said to me, “I really wish I had direct access to the English.”
John:
The solution we’ve developed to this problem delivers audio-to-text accurately, quickly, reliably and inexpensively. We call it Ai-Live™.
Leonie:
Remotely, we have a person who is a respeaker. They use a voice recognition software system. They listen in to all of the audio happening within the environment, which could be a classroom or a work meeting.
Alex:
I want you to open up to the paragraph that is halfway down this page, full stop.
Leonie:
They listen in and respeak everything, adding punctuation and grammar. This is then converted into text, which is streamed back to the laptop or the iPad.
Viren:
Ai-Live™ is a system that delivers word-accurate, real-time, speech-to-text, anywhere.
Warren:
Captioning provides a level of interaction between the deaf student and the teacher that I have never had experienced before.
Rabia:
I was very happy with what came up on the screen and I got really excited, I go, “OK, I’m not being left out anymore.”
Lisa:
The first time I read the captions of what the teacher was saying, I thought, “Wow, this is really exciting.” It was a good thing to have in the classroom. It was the first time I had ever seen something like this. And I felt that when I did read the captions, that I felt very involved.
Sally:
She just adjusted the size of the font that she wanted, read everything that was going on, looked up at the teacher, for one of the first times she’d done that, and just loved being in the classroom. She was really engaged with her teacher, not just with her interpreter. So it was really positive.
Host:
The winners tonight, Ai-Live, Tony Abrahams and Alex Jones!
John:
Ever since Ai-Live appeared on ‘The New Inventors’ program, we’ve had a fantastic response in the education and the workplace, with hundreds of people registering online to try and access the solution.
Man:
It’s actually grasped the advantages around technology.
OtherMan:
Silence must be deafening to a young, enquiring mind. And to overcome that hurdle, I would think it must be as miraculous to them as is liberating. So I think this is an outstanding idea.
Speaker:
We are currently in advanced discussions to provide Ai-Live™ to major universities, beneficial not only for the deaf and hearing-impaired students, but also for Australia’s large, international student market.
Rabia:
I used to sit there, wondering around what’s happening. And trying so hard to listen to the teacher, trying to catch every word he says, but it was very difficult for me. With Ai-Live, I can understand fully.
Lisa:
If I didn’t have Ai-Live, I feel that I wouldn’t care so much about what was happening in the classroom. My grades wouldn’t have improved, and they would have stayed at that low level. And I don’t think I’d be so positive about the future.