Google I/O 2019: Project Euphonia could give speech-impaired their voice back

At its I/O 2019 conference, Google could showcase a new technology called Project Euphonia, which could help speech-impaired by giving them their voice back

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Google’s Project Euphonia could help speech-impaired, and will be likely revealed at the I/O conference. (Image source: Bloomberg)

Google’s annual developer conference, I/O, starts at Mountain View, California on May 7 and will go on till May 9. The Google I/O conference is where we usually see the company display its upcoming technology. Last year for instance, the Google Duplex technology was demonstrated during the I/O keynote. This year, Google could showcase a new technology called Project Euphonia, which could help speech-impaired by giving them their voice back.

According to 9to5Google, which has highlighted details of this, the session is called “Designing for Accessibility” and it mentions “Project Euphonia.” It will be hosted by disability rights activist Elise Roy and Google’s own Michael Brenner.

The description for the session, which takes place on May 8 reads as follow, “Elise Roy will share her own personal story of how becoming deaf at the age of 10 became her greatest gift. A former human rights lawyer, she realized that design thinking can be used to help solve some of our world’s biggest problems. Next, Google’s Michael Brenner will share how Project Euphonia is leveraging Google technologies to give people with speech impairments their voice back.”

Brenner is focusing on Project Euphonia at Google based on his description. While other details about this project are not clear, based on the description, it could be a “real-time voice synthesis for the speech-impaired,” claims the report. It could be a text-to-speech kind of technology for the speech impaired, though details are not clear at this point on exactly how the technology would work.

As pointed out, I/O is where Google tends to showcase some of its best work, some of it could only launch in the future. For instance, last year the highlight was Google Duplex demonstration, which showed how the Google Assistant could in fact book a hair salon appointment or a reserve a table at a restaurant by dialing the establishment and carrying out the task.

The astonishing bit was the Google Assistant was able to sound and emulate a real human’s voice while executing this task. Google said that this technology used their WaveNet voice synthesis technology and Duplex was virtually similar to how an actual human would sound. Google Duplex is only slowly rolling out in the US.

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With Project Euphonia, we could see Google use some of its prowess in machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make voice technologies a lot more accessible. Google is also expected to showcase new features for Android Q and announce the new Pixel 3a phones at I/O 2019.