Stephen Hawking, a British theoretical physicist, used a 20-year-old voice communications system to be replaced by a new generation of communications platforms developed by Intel, significantly improving communication efficiency. But Hawking's voice did not change, and he still used the same speech synthesizer. Hawking is paralyzed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The new custom platform, known as ACAT (assistive Context Aware Toolkit), will open up next January, and other researchers can adapt it to other people with disabilities. The old system has been in use for 20 years and needs to be upgraded, and the new system has increased his typing speed by a factor, reducing the time required to complete common tasks to one-tenth. ACAT uses the technology of the mobile keypad app developer SwiftKey.
Hawking's new voice system ACAT will open source