Back to the 90s with my retro dataset of SMS, TXT abbreviations.. huggingface.co/datasets/… Maybe of use to someone out their creating a GEC model ;)

I’ve been considering LLMs' potential in autocorrecting AAC input. They offer significant gains, but user-guided inference still excels. Yvette’s video demonstrates this: 32 WPM using a glide pad in Dasher. Anyone faster?! We must get a new version developed.

youtu.be/va1WufK86…

I love ASL’s switches. And in particular, the ‘Egg’ Switch (who knew it wasn’t its proper name!). Anyway, I was chatting with Mike in the office today as he wanted it to fit neater in the hand. We are down on Engineers/Masters-of-CAD right now, so I asked GPT to SCAD one. It did a great job.

Mad idea of the day. We have people who have a Speak Unique voice but need to use an iOS device and AAC app that doesn’t support it. Can I use the iOS app on a Mac to train Apple Personal Voice on the Mac using Apple’s own computer vision techniques to read the training text?

If you were to classify and detail “AAC-like” “writing” (yes, its spoken but I’m talking corpora here) how would you define it? Probably different groups of people here but I think you would see a push towards: Short utterances generally 2-5 words long, typo heavy, little grammar.. what else?

There is a lot of evidence for many students (mainly dyslexia in research) that autocorrection software is far more efficient than using a wordpredictor¹. In general, for increasing writing speed, it makes heaps more sense (Note: predictor software can be better if your aim is supporting literacy development) - and I would argue for other areas of AT too ². Using any AI tools (GPT or Bard - but even a lot smaller models will do this), they will “fix” your sentence with a prompt, e.g. “correct this typo sentence including spaces”. But doing this simply, in real-time without user interaction³, is complicated. This fixkey is getting there and worth keeping an eye on ( it needs a shortcut key, which isn’t perfect. It needs to run without that really) https://www.fixkey.ai

Anyone who knows anything about BCI generally 🙄at the neuralink PR output. The BBC found a professional to give a good balanced quote but you can still hear the “sigh” within their comments

Oooh Bard is getting really good now. I’d say that its as good as GPT 4 for coding tasks for sure (thanks Bard for figuring out my latest SwiftUI issue!)

I’ve always wondered why a toilet door on UK trains are so wierdly designed. Who knew it was so hard to design something as simple as a toilet door lock(from I hacked a train toilet)

Modern trains in the UK have disabled toilets with power-operated doors. The older models of these toilets had “open”, ”close” and “lock” buttons on the inside, where you had to press “close”, wait for the door to close, and then press ”lock”. There is no separate “unlock” button; pressing the “open” button on the inside automatically unlocks and opens the door.

Of course, there is a reason for the separation of the closing and locking functions, but not the opening and unlocking functions: it avoids a Denial of Service attack where someone can just press “close” and then jump out before the door closes. If the interior “close” button automatically locked the door, this would result in the toilet becoming permanently inaccessible.

The problem with this design is that most people don’t understand state machines, and this design confused a lot of people who were unable to lock the door correctly, or believed they’d locked the door when they hadn’t.

AAC is at this mad crossroads of computer science, occupational and speech therapy, linguistics, and human-computer interaction ..and more. It’s a world where new ideas - and innovations come and sadly go.

📊 “State of AAC” Survey Brian from OpenAAC is leading an annual survey to capture a snapshot of our field. Whether you’re an AAC user, a therapist, or someone interested in this space, your input matters.

🔗 Survey Link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e…

Fill it in if this is your bag

What do you do with a vast amount of cardboard used to ship some tubes from Germany from Rehadapt? Turn it into a Peppa Pig house. Thanks, Diane!

Built a word segmenter service. We come across many folks who never use a space bar. Instead of hammering home to use the space, why don’t we fix it differently? (spoiler alert: because it’s super hard to do right. LLM’s can do this, but man, you need this running on a device.. see Dear Apple..)

a brilliant plan that is too dumb for anyone to reasonably attempt because of the odds against them may well succeed because nobody expects brilliant people to do such stupid hopeless things

Thomas Cochane was a legend. When you want inspiration in life - read some of Thomas’s wild stories (maybe ditch the explosives..)

The rare blue supermoon. From beside lake Windermere.

Immersive Reader which is these days embedded in everything that Microsoft does it seems is a quiet miracle. I have some niggles (Line Focus - next and previous buttons shouldn’t move), and the web version is heaps better than on desktop.. But still - Its fab - reading coach is particularly awesome.

Am I the stupid one? So you rename one of the most popular apps out there. A vast majority of its users who don’t read tech press know nothing about this. Like most. They go to look at their app. It’s literally gone. No twitter app. Oh but now there’s this dodgy X (1 letter) app. What the actual F ?

The new voice creation tool in iOS and live speech (in-built tts app from any screen) in iOS. My voice is definitely.. clunky .. but bear in mind I recorded this at like 2am in a AirBnB and didn’t want to wake the neighbours. 15 mins recording.

Need an AAC/AT textbook but nowhere near a library or have money? This is awesome from Internet Archive. Loan a textbook for free for an hour at a time. archive.org/details/i… (and my personal fav : archive.org/details/a…)

Just released a new build of our RelayKeys stack. RelayKeys allow us to turn any Windows AAC device into a Bluetooth Keyboard/Mouse (and to come.. Games controller). You plug a small dongle into the AAC device - pair it with any Bluetooth device - a phone, tablet, SmartTV, for example - and then can send keystrokes, macros and Mouse commands to the device. Our new release allows adds the option to use a receiving dongle instead of relying on a device’s own Bluetooth which removes some teams' headaches with managing Bluetooth devices. The attached video shows it working in Tobii Dynavox Communicator - but also we have made pagesets for Smartbox Grid 3 - The dongle costs £12-15 each. Software = Free! None of this wouldn’t be possible without the fab Adafruit. More info at docs.acecentre.org.uk/products/…

youtu.be/R5-eIq9Ih…

I was lucky to see the latest iteration of the Colibri (“Hummingbird”) from Colibri interfaces a few weeks ago. It’s a wireless head mouse - and blink switch. They also have a free web-based Scanning Speller, which is accessible with Blink from your browser. Portuguese only for now.