Oh I See...Can You Say
by: Greg Turner
ADAMLAB
Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency
You asked for some ideas about the future of assistive technology. I can talk about Voice Output Communication Aids (VOCA) technology...
Some trends seem clear:
- The era of the "pancake" VOCA is here (as in "making them like pancakes"). Many of us who have been working in the field for, oh about a hundred years now, have imagined a mass-produced device at a very low cost (well, very low cost relative to the very high costs...). Low enough in cost so that they can become ubiquitous voice things all over the place. The flowering of digital voice technology into the various CheapTalks, Easytalks, Hawks, etc. is that particular dream come true. Hooray!
- Digital voice is the consumer's choice. Devices are coming that will be competitive (vocabulary-amount-wise) with the high end devices that employ DECTalk speech synthesis. For example, the synthetic voice Wolf is a twenty-minute to thirty-minute machine: when digital voice (probably compressed by any one of the various methods employed in digital cell phone technology) is available in thirty-minute chunks for a raw hardware cost of, say, $200 (and it is now rapidly moving toward this and then on down), then consumers will have this as an option. Obviously, for very high end users who spell, text-to-speech (TTS) is the best, but for others, if the device's memory is big enough and cheap enough for digital, you may not need TTS.
- Digitized speech competitive with TTS will enable a hybrid technology (diphone synthesis is the prime example) with high quality synthesis based on mass storage and algorithmic recombination of digital samples. This technology will ultimately supersede DECTalk.
- Continuing difficulties with funding. I get the idea that Medicaid has been popping for some fairly hefty $$ equipment in the past few years--what will be the effect of current legislation on these kinds of sources of third party funding? Rent-to-buy and installment purchase plans may be in your future.
- For education, curriculum-equipment bundles. The only way to fly. Teachers don't have time to be rocket scientists with this stuff; they want ready-to-go. Augmentative communication devices are doing double duty as classroom teaching tools - some even do single duty as such. The beauty of the toaster is that you don't keep having to re-invent how to make toast, you just do it.
- Low-cost dynamic display devices. Mini-units the size of the Apple Newton for fine-motors and then units half-size or so vis-a-vis today's leading products at sub $1500 cost: marketed (correctly) as trainers and start-ups. The leading producers will create trade-in programs so that people can migrate from these to their own greater-function devices.
- School districts will increasingly go to district-wide device "libraries" a.k.a. the PennTech model. This only makes sense; equipment can be properly recycled and students can evolve into different equipment at different times. Devices are assigned to students but ownership per se is maintained by the district or super-district agency. Now districts can be pro-active and have reasonable plans to start "beginning" students on cost-effective equipment, provide the curricular support and training to make it work and migrate the students onward and upward (we hope!) to the Slightly-more-expensive-Talks of the industry.
- Over the short haul, purveyors of the more expensive devices will see their business dented by laptops outfitted with special education software. The arguments for such are persuasive, e.g. you get a whole computer, color screens, you can get touchwindows etc. Computer technology is hard to resist and the highest-brow groups, i.e. academe and university-associated biomedicals/rehabs like them.
- The World VOCA will arrive. Just as every corner of the earth, no matter how poor, has transistor radio technology, so is it possible for an EvencheaperTalk to spread to where it's needed. Communication is one of the fundamental rights of humankind and we heighten and preserve our humanity when we ensure that "everyone communicates."
