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Hawking speech software free to download

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 19 Aug 2015
Intel developed the software scientist Stephen Hawking is able to communicate through, and it has now been made open source. (Picture: Doug Wheller)
Intel developed the software scientist Stephen Hawking is able to communicate through, and it has now been made open source. (Picture: Doug Wheller)

Intel has released the software system theoretical physicist professor Stephen Hawking uses to communicate, as an open source code.

Hawking suffers from a motor neuron disease that hampers his ability to walk, talk and breathe.

Intel's Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) was developed at Intel Labs to enable people with forms of Hawking's disease and other disabilities to have full access to their computers through constrained interfaces.

"More specifically, ACAT enables users to easily communicate with others through keyboard simulation, word prediction and speech synthesis," Sai Prasad, Intel project owner, wrote on Intel's Web site.

"Professor Hawking was instrumental to the design process and was a key contributor to the project design and validation. After Intel deployed the system to him, 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.

"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," said Prasad.

ACAT is only designed to run on Microsoft Windows machines; there is no indication it will be available for other operating systems in future.

Former Springbok rugby captain Joost van der Westhuizen also battles with a form of the same disease as Hawking.

The motor neuron diseases are a group of severe disorders that attack the brain and spinal cord.

The application is available for download on GitHub.

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