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Last Words
Israeli Software Enables Deaf to Use Cell Phones
by Yahoo
26/11/2002
TEL AVIV - Israel's largest mobile phone operator Cellcom and Israeli start-up SpeechView launched on Tuesday a worldwide patented software that will allow the deaf and hard of hearing to communicate through mobile phones.
The product LipCcell is a software installed in the user's computer and connected with a cable to a cell phone. When the deaf user gets a call, the software translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer, whose lips move in real time synch with the voice allowing the receiver to lip read.
The software can be used initially only with a computer or laptop, said SpeechView chief executive Tzvika Nayman, though future developments will allow the software to be installed on personal digital assistants.
Under the agreement, Cellcom will be the sole distributor of the kits in Israel with its revenues deriving from the calls, Cellcom deputy chief executive Oren Most told Reuters.
The kits, including a CD and cable, will cost $125.
Some basic training, included in the instruction manual of the CD, is needed to better interpret the lip nuances of the animated figure, Neyman said, with the software also using color on the animated figure's nose or cheeks to differentiate between sounds that are confusingly similar.
"The additional signs added to the animated figure raise the level of identification from 35 to 85 percent," he said.
Nayman said he knows of no such technology in the world, and added that SpeechView was in touch with mobile phone operators in Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands to further distribute the product.
"There is no language limitation," Nayman said, adding that all phonemic languages can be translated by the software.
The technology was created by Nachshon Margaliot, an information systems specialist, who stumbled upon the need for the product while working with a hard of hearing colleague.
"I couldn't understand how the communication world had forgotten the hard of hearing and why there was no comprehensive solution," Margaliot said.
A spokesman for SpeechView said 10 percent of the world population had different levels of hearing difficulties, of which half were suited to use the software.
Entrepreneur Paul Baan, co-founder and past president of the Netherlands based Baan Co, is the main shareholder of SpeechView through the Noaber Beheer Foundation, having invested $2 million in the two year old company, the spokesman said.
Reuven Baram, chairman of the Shema organization in Haifa, a center for the hard of hearing said it would contribute significantly to the deaf community but added that one deaf student had had some difficulty lip-reading the figure.
Cellcom is a subsidiary of BellSouth, Brazil's Safra Group and Israel's Discount Investment Corp.
Read the full article at Yahoo
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