Intel making Stephen Hawking's speech system available to developers

PanARMENIAN.Net - The speech system developed for renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is being made available to the masses, Intel has confirmed, according to Digital Spy.

Having produced the system that allows Hawking - who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - to communicate using small facial movements, the computer giant has released the relevant software as a downloadable toolkit.

Making use of infrared sensors and a camera to transform facial movements into navigational movements on a computer interface, the tech currently allows Hawking to spell out words, with predictive software helping complete sentences.

Intel has revealed it hopes making the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) public will allow developers to modify and advance the system for future uses.

"After Intel deployed the system to Professor Hawking, we turned our attention to the larger community and continued to make ACAT more configurable to support a larger set of users with different conditions," Intel announced via an official blog post.

"Our hope is that, by open sourcing this configurable platform, developers will continue to expand on this system by adding new user interfaces, new sensing modalities, word prediction and many other features."

The ACAT release is now available as a free download via GitHub, with manuals, guides and support documentation also being offered up.