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Project

Symbolsnare

Over two million speech-disabled people in the US alone rely on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices to help express their everyday thoughts, needs, and ideas. Some of these devices now support extensible vocabularies; however, the means of extension are too cumbersome to permit new symbols to be defined on demand, for immediate use in an utterance. On the time scale of a conversation, this shortcoming limits AAC users to a relatively small, fixed vocabulary. Symbolsnare is a gaze-speech interface enabling an AAC user to instantly extend the vocabulary of his or her device. New symbols are captured from the environment and imported into the user's AAC using an eye-tracking digital capture system triggered by button presses or simple vocalisations. By opening the vocabulary of AAC devices to the world, Symbolsnare empowers the speech-disabled to discuss anything they can see.