{"id":9062,"date":"2019-06-17T15:02:22","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T13:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.voicebooking.com\/blog\/?p=5368"},"modified":"2023-06-08T15:06:20","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T13:06:20","slug":"cannes-lions-deaf-911-and-genderless-voice-assistants-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.voicebooking.com\/en\/blog\/cannes-lions-deaf-911-and-genderless-voice-assistants-news","title":{"rendered":"Cannes Film festival: Voice over assistants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starting today, things are gearing up in Cannes. The five day festival and award show offers the creative industry access to fantastic new ideas, breakthrough research and up-and-coming technologies. For a number of years the festival in Cannes has gone much further than advertising and communication alone. Research, innovation, impact, health and entertainment are also important topics. Audio too is creeping up the agenda every year. That\u00b4s why you can find our favourite contenders in this blog.
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Audio, thankfully, is once again garnering a lot of interest. Thanks to the rise of streaming services; the popularity of podcasts; the increasing number of voice assistants; the rediscovery of radio as a medium; and, the increasing attention that music for online video is getting these days. Because of all these new uses for audio there are now also diverse categories open for submissions in the Radio & Audio Lions: ‘Excellence in Radio & Audio\u2019, \u2018Innovation in Radio & Audio\u2019 and \u2018Radio & Audio in Culture & Context\u2019, for example. We chose our personal favourites from among all the submissions that are in the running for a coveted Lion this week.<\/p>\n

1. \u2018SeeSound\u2019 warns the deaf when an alarm sounds<\/h2>\n

In the U.S. alone there are 9 million households where at least 1 member of the family is deaf. What happens when this adult is the only one home and something alarming happens? A fire alarm goes off, a siren, or a child screaming in pain for instance. SeeSound <\/a> has the solution. It is a smart home hearing system based on machine learning. The software is fed with 2 million YouTube videos, in which all sorts of variations of 75 house, garden and kitchen noises can be heard. Via WiFi and an app the deaf member of the family gets an alert with a description of the sound that the SeeSound device has picked up.
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2. \u2018Deaf 911\u2019 translates text to speech<\/h2>\n

Equally clever and also aimed at deaf members of the community is the app Deaf 911<\/a>. This app works with speech to text and text to speech technology. The words of the 911 operator appear as text on the smartphone of the deaf caller. These can be pre-set text suggestions or the spoken answers of the operator which are directly turned into text. In this way people who are deaf or hard of hearing communicate with 911 much quicker and more easily. An elegant and useful innovation, with a big role for audio technology.
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