Speech enabling system

Abstract

A system and method for recognizing (reading) the tongue movements, vocalizations, and throat vibrations of a person and converting (translating) them into meaningful synthesized words, which could be pronounced by an electronic speaker and/or displayed on a display. Often a patient/person who has lost the ability to speak may still be able to move their tongues, or make unfathomable sounds, which cannot be recognized as intelligible words. The system and method can continuously record the movement of the patient's tongue, vocalizations, and throat sounds and extract small video segments corresponding to different words attempted by the patient. Each of these video segments can then be analyzed by AI software or other configured software to match the specific tongue movement with a pre-learned reference word, and once identified, the computer/system can speak or verbalize the word, and/or display it on a screen. The set of pre-learned reference words can be recorded and saved during the training session(s) for each individual patient. During the training session(s), the embedded AI software or other configured software can ask the patient to say a specific word multiple times and for each time, the system/software can record the associated tongue movements, and any verbalizations, and throat vibrations. Multiple recordings for a single word can be preferably performed so that the AI software or other configured software can capture all possible movement variations of the same word and can aggregate some common features as unique identification for that word, which can be saved in the system as a reference to that specific word.