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A team from the University of Dundee's Applied Computing Department has come up with an idea to help non-speaking people communicate which is to be incorporated in systems for international distribution.
The department, which has a world wide reputation for its work in developing systems to help disabled people communicate, is poised for the launch of the systems incorporating their CHAT facility which improves communication speed and allows users to take part in the give and take of a normal dialogue.
The CHAT prototype, originally developed by Dr Norman Alm, Dr John Arnott, and Professor Alan Newell has from the outset had an influence on the way communication systems for non-speakers are designed. It was directly included in the Talk:About system, launched two years ago and marketed by a US based company. Now two more systems with a CHAT facility are to be marketed. These are the TALK Boards, distributed by another UScompany, and ScripTalker, a system to be marketed this year by three companies, in Germany, The Netherlands and the UK -- so ScripTalker will be chatting in English, German and Dutch. Negotiations are
underway for Scandinavian versions to be produced soon.
The idea of CHAT is to improve communication speed and effectiveness by
modelling aspects of ordinary human conversation, and taking advantage of the fact that much conversation follows predictable and repeatable lines. This allows a significant increase in communication rate, taking users from their current rate of less than 10 words per minute to 50 words per minute and beyond. CHAT also helps users to take part more easily in the informal give and take which characterises real social interaction.
"We are thrilled at the success of this prototype", said Dr. Alm. "It sgreat to see academic research, which has been studying conversation patterning for many years, find such a useful application. We are very pleased to have helped this to happen." All of the projects which have resulted in products have beenmulti-disciplinary team efforts, Dr. Alm emphasised. "As well as CHAT,
The Talk:About system contains ground-breaking work done by Dr Annalu Waller on narratives and Dr Liz Broumley on sentence prediction. The
TALK Boards result from work directed by Dr John Todman of the Psychology Department here along with Dr Portia File and Dr Leona
Elder from Abertay University. TALK includes a model of the wayconversation flows from topic to topic. CHAT helps with opening and
closing a conversation and giving feedback to another person, but needs to be part of a wider system which can help the user carry out an
extended conversation on a topic. So this outcome has been a tremendous Contact Dr Norman Alm Department of Applied Computing University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, UK DD1 4HN E-mail: nalm@mic.dundee.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 1382 345596, Fax: +44 (0) 1382 345509 Website : http://alpha.mic.dundee.ac.uk/~nalm/home.html
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