Display Your Speech In Realtime To Help Lipreaders In The Mask Era

Masks are all well and good when it comes to reducing the spread of deadly pathogens, but they can make it harder to understand people when they speak. They also make lipreading impossible. [Kevin Lewis] set about building something to help.

The system consists of a small screen that can be worn on the chest or other part of the body, and a lapel microphone to record the wearer’s speech. Using the Deepgram AI speech recognition API running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the system decodes the speech and displays it on the Hyperpixel screen.

The API is quite capable, and can be set to only respond to the wearer’s voice, or in a group mode, display speech from multiple people in the area, displaying other voices in another colour. There’s also a translation feature using the iTranslateApp API as well.

It’s a neat tool that could be of great use in conferences or in situations where a quick simple machine translation could majorly ease communication. Video after the break.

18 thoughts on “Display Your Speech In Realtime To Help Lipreaders In The Mask Era

  1. And how well will that work in a noisy environment? A mic in the mask should help with that. Maybe combined with a throat mic to confirm the source for really loud environments.

  2. Masks don’t protect me from you, they protect everyone else from your inconsiderate, possibly-infected ass. Please go die of COVID as quickly as possible and leave this world, you selfish fuck.

    1. I think it’s near impossible to focus on the whole mouth at that kind of distance. My first thought was a clear mask with filters over the cheeks where they don’t block the view. Prototypes have been featured in articles almost since this mess started but I haven’t seen any for sale.

    1. MFW you realize that even the CDC and WHO call your cloth mask useless:

      :D

      One day people like you will look back and realize you’ve been hoodwinked. Instead of admitting it, you’ll move the goalposts and rationalize your poor behavior with this phrase:

      “I was just doing what I was told.”

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