From Visible Speech To Sign Gloves
How the deaf played a transformative role in communications —
When I started Rogervoice, it was designed as an app that allows the deaf and hard-of-hearing to make phone calls. But of course, there’s much more to it than one sees at first glance.
Rogervoice is born of a 140 year legacy of entrepreneurship and innovations, spanning artificial intelligence, cybergenetics, and telecommunications.
Back in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s research on phonetics and acoustics led to the invention of the telephone. His research was inspired by his mother and his wife, both of them deaf. Bell had researched different ways to communicate with them.
When you look back on it, telephones can be seen as nothing more than “long-distance hearing aids” destined to give human beings the super-ability to hear voices from far away.
Bell’s inspiration upon working with the deaf and his pioneering research blazed the way for innovative uses of speech and natural language processing, literally changing the way the world communicated.
The struggles of a few have produced lasting benefits for many.
Bell also educated many deaf children on the use of speech and signed alphabets, including Hellen Keller. He eventually married one of his deaf students, Mabel Hubbard. Her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, soon became one of Bell’s benefactors. This early business angel was critical to Bell’s success in promoting these technological applications for deaf persons into wider use.
Hubbard eventually became one of the founders and first presidents of the Bell Telephone Company, which later became AT&T, a multibillion dollar corporation spanning the globe.
Inventing technologies for the disabled is not just right but smart business.
— Frank Moss, Director MIT Media Lab, author The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices Crown Business 2011
Innovations produced by and for deaf persons didn’t stop here. Bell’s father, Melville Bell, had also developed “Visible Speech,” a system of phonetic symbols. These symbols showed how to physically make the sounds needed to say any word. Alexander Graham Bell later developed these into special gloves with the letters of the alphabet on them, which allowed deaf people to communicate through spelling words.
Today, we see many applications for “sign gloves” being developed by students and researchers. These prototypes have led to breakthroughs in connected devices, video gaming and military applications.
Bell’s work with the deaf also had implications in cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence. At his Volta Laboratory in Washington D.C., he further developed his concepts into what would become the spectrograph.
The idea of the use of a spectrograph to translate speech into a visual representation was created in the hopes of enabling the deaf to use a telephone, by translating the sounds into something readable.
Fast-forward to 1940’s, where researchers at MIT took up the spectrograph again, which became the basis of speech recognition systems used today. As recounted by disabilities studies scholar Mara Mills, the MIT researchers had essentially taken up the “hearing glove” concept from Bell.
A brilliant mathematician at MIT, Norbert Weiner, obtained permission from AT&T to take up Bell’s research and develop a cybernetic glove by converting speech into sensory patterns, as a means to investigate the cybernetic principles of aural systems.
The project generated substantial interest, with the New York Times and Life heralding the new wonder. As recounted by Ronald R. Kline in his 2015 book The Cybernetics Moment, Hellen Keller wrote to Weiner:
“I can never be too grateful when I reflect that you have said that the experiments you are trying out for the deaf are the first constructive application of cybernetics to human beings.”
“Because of the media hype,” explains Kline, “MIT and Weiner were kept busy explaining to impatient parents of deaf children, and also to Hellen Keller, who had tried out the device in the lab, that the project was still in the experimental stage.”
There were many bugs in Weiner’s system, and it never matured into a fully functional product. It did, however, lead to breakthroughs in cognitive computing and speech recognition systems.
As Seymour Papert explains it, we all have varying degrees of abilities, and it is often those at the edge of their comfort levels who drive the rest to seek solutions.
We are all disabled, just at different levels.
— Seymour Papert, co-founder Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT
In nature, humans appear disadvantaged in the race for survival. We lack the superpowers of our peers in the animal kingdom: the wolf’s sense of hearing and smell, the lion’s strength and speed, or the eagle’s wings and eyesight.
The flip side of human’s fundamental physical and sensorineural weakness is our capacity to innovate. With our ability to work together, and to use tools, we’ve developed means to improve our lives. And therein lies humanity’s strength.
We’ve all heard of the oft-cited expression “necessity is the mother of invention.” Those most exposed to necessity are those who stand the most to gain from inventions. It is true of any segment of a population, but especially so for persons with disabilities.
For most people, technology makes things easier. For people with disabilities, technology makes things possible.
— Mary Pat Radabaugh, IBM Center for Persons With Disabilities
Persons with disabilities are often ahead of the adoption curve when it comes to innovation. Chances are, the tools we innovate to better our conditions will, sooner or later, have implications for society as a whole.
Have a go with Rogervoice ! https://rogervoice.com
