Handheld Transcription Device for the Hearing Impaired

The purpose of this proposal is to present a unique and promising solution for a handheld device for hearing impaired individuals. In a conversation situation with multiple English speakers, the device will display on a screen, “Speaker 1: …,” “Speaker 2: …,” …, “Speaker N: …,” and all the English conversation will be transcribed into English text. Our novel solution consists of both hardware and software. The hardware is a handheld computer with a four-sensor microphone array. The software includes two features: speaker recognition and speech recognition. The microphone array will be modified from this company’s new USB-based microphone array product named CrispMic™ which can give us several advantages. Furthermore, as inspired by the human auditory system, we have proposed a novel, auditory-based feature extraction algorithm, which has the potential to improve the performance and robustness of both speaker and speech recognition significantly. The entire system will be implemented with a low-cost, handheld computer.