August 18, 2019
The sounds of routine household noises is something many of us take
for granted. For people who are deaf and hard of hearing, this can be
challenging. A startup called Wavio based in the United States promises to
change with a device that will help deaf people see sounds.
The beep of a microwave, a baby crying, or the sound of water overflowing are
noises that hearing people take for granted. That’s not the case for people
who are deaf and hard of hearing, and this can be sometimes even be life
threatening. An app called Wavio, developed by a startup of the
same name aims to change that by helping deaf people “see” sounds”.
Developed by three deaf men, Wavio uses artificial intelligence to identify
over 500 sounds.
Wavio works on its own as an app or in union with a smart home
device called See Sound.
The system listens for sounds like a dog’s bark, baby’s cry, fire alarm
alerts and even the shattering of glass.
The current products in the market are extremely limited. We can buy a
device for a smoke detector and another that tells us when the doorbell is
ringing but nothing that can distinguish between a microwave beeping, baby
crying or a dog barking. The reason why no one has been able to create a
product like this is shortage of data. In order to teach a machine learning
model how to distinguish sounds with any level of accuracy you would need
millions of sound samples. –Spencer Montan, Co-founder,
Wavio
The answer, as the founders discovered, lay in YouTube which
contains a billion hours of videos with sounds. “We trained the See Sound
machine with sound clips from YouTube”, says Montan. “Over two million videos
were analysed, categorised and converted into 10 second sound clips, each
with a distinct sound”.
Every type of sound in the data model like yelling is made of several
thousand YouTube audio samples ranging from common household noises to alerts
that could mean life or death. “Every sound we add makes our machine protocol
learning even smarter allowing for even higher accuracy range”, adds Montan.
At any given time, See Sound is always listening for the over 75 sounds it is
programmed to hear. Once the sound occurs it interprets it and communicates
it to the user.
Wavio is still being tested and if all goes well, will be made available to
users by early 2020, offering nearly nine million deaf households in the
United States the possibility of seeing sound.
Chennai deaf teacher Vidya Menon says a device like Wavio
could change lives of deaf and hard of hearing people in India too. “I had
this experience using a pressure cooker once when I left it unattended for a
few seconds and when I came back, the whistle broke out due to less water and
all the stream came right up to the ceiling”.
Vidya says she now never leaves the kitchen for long if there’s something
cooking. “I watch over everything that’s cooking, whether its in the pressure
cooker, microwave, even the oven. I cannot leave the kitchen unattended when
I am alone. I have to be back every few seconds”.
A system like See Sound, says Vidya, would enable greater independence. “Now
when I hear any sound through the hearing aid, I check the door first to see
if someone’s there because I can’t recognise the sound type. I will be happy
if devices like See Sound are launched here as it will enable the deaf
community to live easily”.
Source: https://newzhook.com/story/tech-startup-wavio-develops-device-that-will-help-deaf-people-see-sounds
