Giving Birth To Rogervoice
Going outside of my comfort zone forced me to tackle a global need.
I’m sitting in an office, in a clean white shirt and tie, impatiently tapping my fingers on the desk. My coworkers, Javier and Franck, are opposite me. A conference call is underway and the phone is on loudspeaker mode. I look intently at them for a while, then my attention wanders off.
Back at my office, Franck is handling the call and Javier asks with a raised eyebrow if I’m fine. I flash back a smile and a thumbs-up. But in fact, I had no clue what is being said on the line.
My coworkers understand though. Javier indicates the call is boring and not worth following. He then types on his screen “they’re saying the new business plan needs to be revised.” Why? I ask. “It’s complicated. I’ll explain later” Javier responds. I drum my fingers again.
I grew up with a hearing loss. Communication has never been something I took for granted. But rather as an experience in itself.
To understand what people say, many deaf and hard-of-hearing persons resort to lip-reading. I can lip-read at an astounding level, and catch most of what other people say. Lip-reading however is not an exact science. It’s a lot of guesswork, which I do almost unconsciously. But at the end of the day, I’m usually drained from the sheer effort.
Because of my deafness, I am not able to use a telephone. I manage most situations just fine with SMS and email and Facetime. But it always seems to me like my life would be so much easier if I could just pick up a phone. And call. Anyone. Anywhere.
America has had a phone relay system in place since the 1990’s, with interpreters that relay a call for deaf people. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Only a handful of countries have such a system. The rest of the world doesn’t.
Over 70 million people worldwide cannot phone due to severe hearing loss or deafness. That’s an issue of massive proportions. One that is totally unmet, with individuals each relying on different means to get around the problem. Usually at the expense of considerable time and effort. If they even bother to try.
Going Outside Of My Comfort Zone
After my studies I eventually spent a career at Orange, the French multinational telecom carrier. The irony of being deaf and working for a telecom carrier hadn’t escaped me.
But now, living in France crystallised the problem with phone calls for me. There was no phone-relay service in place.
I’ve always loved taking up new challenges. And so with this entrepreneurial mindset I started wondering if there was a way to make telephone conversations universally accessible even for the deaf. Without calling upon national regulation or requiring millions of dollars.
More generally, I wanted to be independent. I wanted to stop depending on others to handle a conference call, make a reservation, or even just to call my parents.
The advent of speech recognition, I felt, would eventually change the game. And the timing was right, the technology was here. It’s time to bring some innovation in accessibility in the telecommunications industry.
And that’s how in 2014 I quit my job and launched Rogervoice.
This article first appeared on The Limping Chicken October 2014
