VOICE BASED SYSTEM ON DESKTOP FOR BLIND PEOPLE

Project Abstract / Summary : T
oday in the information age computer has become a
integral part of every body’s life. We use a computer to
hear songs, read something, accessing information from the
internet. We use computer everywhere. But the information
access and computer handling has
to be done with the
mouse and keyboard and by reading all the things present
on the screen and then deciding what to do making it a
visual process means we need eye sight to handle the
information on the computer i.e. if we want to read news
from the inte
rnet we have to first open a browser and then
open a website to read news and then follow the links to
read specific news. The decision making depends upon the
eye sight and by reading everything that appears on the
screen. So the computer and information
age is not for the
blind. The blind people cannot read the information and
cannot view the mouse cursor to give command to the
computer. They cannot access their mail and cannot send a
mail. Thus the computer becomes a impractical thing for
the blind peopl
e and information retrieval a tedious job. We
are going to develop a information retrieval toolkit for the
blind and then transform the information into a Braille
language for the blind people to read it and also keep a
option of speech to read it. We are
searching for a few
things like how are we going to access the internet without
a browser and how we are going to play the songs and read
books without a mouse use.
The systems available now a day
’
s uses screen readers
which read information displayed on
desktop or it prints
information on Braille printer. ASR
(Automatic speech
recognizer) and TTS
(text to speech) get used for
converting speech to text and vice versa. Although these
technologies are being improved continuously, some major
problems still pe
rsist which make them unusable as a way
of accessing email to a large segment of Blind people.
These systems have following drawbacks.
1.
With the help of screen readers it is difficult for blind
person to access E
-
mail system and computer
operating easily. B
ecause it has noisy audio interface.
2.
ASR is still
in development
stage. In case of noisy
environment performance of ASR degrade.
3.
Both ASR and TTS are highly language dependent.
So the system developed for one language is not
applicable to other.
4.
Now a
day’
s
mobile is very common word it is known
to almost all peoples even school goers also use
mobile. Moreover, tools and technologies above for
the blind users are unavailable for mobile devices.
5.
These systems are not very much useful for small
scale applicat
ion for E
-
mail.
6.
These available systems require use of keyboard
which is very difficult for blind people to recognize
and remember characters of keyboard.
Keeping in view all of these, goal of our project is to
reduce limitations and problems mentioned abo
ve. Our
system allows blind person to his/her voice instead of
converting speech to text, the system directly sends
recorded voice message to recipients mail address as an
attachment. The system also provide option of desktop
browser which helps to search
contents in computer,
Operate multimedia functions of computer such as
audio, text, News on internet can be read by system. In this
system we use Microsoft speech SDK which is a software
development kit for building speech engine and application
for Micro
soft window. SDK contain SAPI i.e. you can use
SDK run time to build application programming interface

Why did you choose to work on this project topic : Voice mail architecture helps blind people to
access e
-
ma
il and other multimedia functions of operating
system (songs, text).Also in mobile application SMS can be
read by system itself. Now a days the advancement made in
computer technology opened platforms for visually impaired
people across the world. It has b
een observed that nearly
about 60% of total blind population across the world is
present in INDIA. In this paper, we describe the voice mail
architecture used by blind people to access E
-
mail and
multimedia functions of operating system easily and
efficien
tly. This architecture will also reduce cognitive load
taken by blind to remember and type characters using
keyboard. It also helps handicapped and illiterate people.

Project Category : CS / IT / Networking
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Institute/College Name: RCPIT SHIRPUR
City: SHIRPUR
State: MAHARASHTRA
Participating Team From: Final Year