So sometimes.. just sometimes.. a couple of months works pays off. Or I guess we could frame this post around successful product development - keeping the end user the focus of your development and involving them at all stages of your development cycle is key. We are proud to shout loudly about this.

So two months ago we saw Judith. Technology has not been successful for her before. (You can read more why in my previous posts). So we rapidly developed a SwiftUI app that was unique in its operation - you dragged from one letter to the next. Trying it with Judith we still had a problem - positional errors and missing letters were high. So we then rapidly worked on a “correct-a-sentence system” and settled on using a Azure OpenAI API (GPT3.5) and then developed our own custom model alongside this (needing something that worked offline and privacy first was key (NB: The videos is this offline model - Not GPT). A few iterations of this and its correcting as good as GPT 3.5 83% of the time.

So two months later, what does this all mean for the end user? They can now write on technolgy to communicate for the very first time. Happy - well so far yes. But long term AAC use is complex and not just down to the technology. So lets be curious and proud at the same time. There is more to do

• Small tweaks in the UI
• Its correcting a bit too much at times - sometimes adding more grammar changes than I would like - and equally dangerous - losing words. To fix this we could further train our custom model.

and then more I’m sure the next time we review this cycle of the iterative development cycle.

What does this process look like overall?

We follow the double-diamond development cycle. It’s a pretty common approach yet following it is not always easy.

So lessons so far?

• Iterate Fast: Rapid prototyping and adjustments are key to finding viable solutions for complex, unique solutions. There is a much longer tail to development for solid, reliable products but getting somewhere fast helps to see whats important.
• User-Centric Design: Keeping the user at the heart of all stages of development ensures that the technology we develop truly meets their needs. Its not always easy but it can be done. Its important to do this as part of a team though. It can so easily be lost as to whether you are getting carried away or whether you are on track. We pride ourselves on at Ace Centre being a transdisciplinary team where never one person sees the whole picture.
• Continuous Learning: Every challenge presents a learning opportunity, pushing us to constantly improve. And heck - its good fun too seeing big gains.
• Passion and Persistence: A keen interest in making a difference and the drive to keep pushing forward are indispensable.

Objectified (2009, 75 minutes) is a documentary film about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

It’s a great film (and free to watch from March 14-17!) but in particular, I love this quote from Dan Formosa, Design & Research, Smart Design, New York (around 6 minutes in)

But really our common interest is in understanding people and what their needs are. So if you start to think, well really, what these guys do as consultants is focus on people, then it’s easy to think about what’s needed design wise in the kitchen, or in the hospital, or in the car.

We have clients coming to us and saying here’s our average customer. For instance, she’s female, she’s 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids.

And we listen politely and say, well that’s great, but we don’t care about that person. What we really need to do to design is look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest, or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.

View it online at www.ohyouprettythings.com/free

Some clients we see are fantastic with paper-based solutions. But sometimes, finding powered AAC systems which give them more independence is far trickier than you may think. Consider Judith. She doesn’t lift her finger from the paper. This continuous movement is surprisingly not well supported in AAC. Your obvious thoughts are SwiftKey and Swype, but they require a lift-up at the end of a word or somewhere else. Next up, you may try a Keguard or TouchGuide. But then, for some users, this is too much of a change in user interaction. Even if you succeed, you often ask an end user to change the orientation or layout of their paper-based system.. and all in all, it’s just too much change. Abandonment is likely. The paper-based system is just more reliable.

So what do we do? We could look at a bespoke system. But typically, it requires much thought, effort and scoping. That’s still needed, but you can draft something up far quicker these days using ChatGPT. It wrote the whole app after a 2-hour stint of prompt writing. Thats awesome. (Thanks also to Gavin, who tidied up the loose ends). So, this app can be operated by detecting a change in angular direction or detecting a small dwell on each letter. We need to now trial this with our end user and see what’s more likely to work and what’s not and work this up. We may need a way of writing without going to space (something that we see quite a lot), and I can see us implementing a really needed feature, autocorrect. This is all achievable. But for now, we have a working solution to trial a 500 lines of code app made in less than a day’s work.

At MOSI in Manchester today, I saw Stephen Hawking’s Chair and other neat things from his office in Cambridge. Note the spaghetti of cables. It’s tricky to figure out where all the leads go, but I’ll give it a wild guess. The plugs look like either mini XLR or the old PS2 Serial leads. Some questions, though; I’m unsure what the “Filter” box fits to and why is the Words+ box even used? I thought the connection with Intel meant he was using ACAT. Why is that Words+ Softkey box the parallel version when there is clearly a lot of USB kicking about, too? Why are we plugging into something behind the chair when surely the tablet has the speakers anyway? There are as many questions than answers.

• Words+ Archive page (This is the USB version of the softkey box)
• Case for Original Synthesiser made by David Mason at Cambridge Adaptive
• Chair details

We’ve given our little Translate and Speak app for Windows a complete makeover. Our app not only translates text but also vocalizes messages from the message window using online services. We’ve introduced a user-friendly GUI to simplify configuration, extended support to include paid translation services, and here’s the grand reveal… you can now empower any Windows AAC app to leverage Google Cloud TTS or Azure TTS which massively opens up the possibility of using AAC with more languages. You can even use these services without translation - so just to speak.

Get your hands on the early version here. BUT - just a heads up, you will need to be comfortable obtaining keys for Azure or Google Cloud. Check out our (somewhat outdated) docs for guidance. And ping me some feedback before we release it properly. Prizes for someone who can make me a nice demo video!

Silent Speech & Sub-Vocal research is picking up. EMG can detect speech since the 70s but It’s been hard to make it useful. Now though? There are even instructions for making your own . Check out some papers and AlterEgo from MIT for a fancy demo. It’s AI aka “Applied Statistics” making this possible - and I feel that it’s this aiding access that will be the biggest impact on our field than areas of language.