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According to Dr Faulkner: "For most people the telephone is an essential part of our lives, in both social and workplace settings. For people with a severe hearing loss, however, the phone is virtually useless, putting them at a severe disadvantage. This project seeks to address this imbalance, by using the principles of visual information in speech communication."

SYNFACE, which implies synthetic face, is a joint initiative between UCL's Department of Phonetics & Linguistics and a number of research groups in The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, including the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. Using automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, an animated talking head displays the lip movements of the speaker at the other end of the line. This ensures that people with hearing difficulties can see the virtual face of the person they are talking to, just as in face-to-face conversation.

Dr Faulkner says: "All of us, not just the hearing impaired, are able to use lip-reading, but we're not normally aware that we're doing it. In face-to-face conversation any normally sighted person, regardless of their hearing ability, will understand a talker more accurately when they can see the person's face. SYNFACE uses this principle to empower hearing impaired people with the ability to use the telephone without difficulty."

The prototype for SYNFACE is currently in field trials for three European languages: English, Dutch and Swedish, and comes with the added benefit of being cost effective. SYNFACE is designed to work with any telephone and only requires a standard laptop screen, making it considerably less costly than its alternative, video telephony. As well as benefiting those with hearing difficulties, it is also envisaged that the system will be used for other purposes, such as public voice information channels in noisy environments such as airports, and as an audio-visual tool for language training.Ìý

Image: 'Kattis', a talking head from the SYNFACE project.

To find out more about the project, use the links below.

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