klankbrouwerij

SSI, a very interesting name for a company advancing AI! "Solid State Intelligence" or SSI was also the name of the malevolent entity described in the biography of John C. Lilly [0][1]. It was a network of "computers" (computation-capable solid state systems) that was first engineered by humans and then developed into something autonomous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

[1] http://johnclilly.com/

Your friend can take a look at solutions from Acapela [0], SpeakUnique [1] or VOCALiD [2]. Not sure whether they have a solution for Android though.

I recently saw a video from google about a custom voice they created for somebody with ALS but I can't seem to find it online (Does anybody have a link?). Creating custom voices is not yet available on Android though. The latest iOS release (iOS 17) does support creating personalized voices.

ModelTalker [3] is a long-term (research?) project to create custom voices for people with speech disabilities. Their TTS seem to support Android so that might be another option.

[0] https://www.acapela-group.com/ [1] https://www.speakunique.co.uk/ [2] https://vocalid.ai/ [3] https://www.modeltalker.org/

For those who are missing some context, a flamer can also mean a very flamboyant ("flaming"), effeminate gay male [1].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flamer

Nice work! Interesting idea to combine an app with “real” books!

One of your challenges for your business model might be to ensure long-term engagement. Parents might be very interested in your product but might lose interest after a while, leading to high churn rate after a few months. How are you dealing with this? Any tips for other startups who are also selling to parents?

Your app reminds me of Google’s Read Along [0], which is also a reading tutor for young children which one of Google’s offline speech recognition systems (it seems they are currently using an RNN-T encoder-decoder architecture with wordpieces as the base unit). Too bad this app was not marketed properly and translated in many languages, a missed opportunity it seems!

Soapbox Labs [1] is providing a speech recognition API (also offline) for reading tutors and other apps. It might be cheaper to integrate their technology? I believe their ASR technology used to be based (or still is?) on the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit, that might ring a bell ;-)

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [1] https://www.soapboxlabs.com/

Nice work! Has anybody compared this to TorToiSe [1] ?

[1] https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

10x seems really high? 10x is just twice as fast

SQLCipher [1] seems to be missing from the list. It is a SQLite extension that encrypts/decrypts a SQLite database on the fly. Works quite well in my experience.

[1] https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher/

Thanks for sharing, looks interesting!

My oldest son (4y) has also a rare genetic disorder (18q12.3q21.1 deletion). Part of the chromosome that is missing is the SETBP1 gene [1] and this deletion can result in developmental delay, reduced speech and motor skills, intellectual disability and other issues such as autism. My son’s speech for example is limited to simple consonant-vowel syllables. Dr. Angela Morgan, who is mentioned on the IDefine website, is also conducting research on the SETBP1 gene [2]. You can take a look at the website of the SETBP1 Society [3] to get some additional inspiration for your foundation. They are also raising funds to promote basic research and awareness.

Community building will be an important part of your foundation and parents. In our case, we joined the SETBP1 support group on Facebook. It is always heartwarming and comforting to read other peoples and to know that you are not the only one that is in a similar situation. The Facebook group keeps us also updated on recent scientific progress and we were able to join a research study on SETBP1.

I know that having a kid that is unable to communicate is hard. Very hard. When our son was younger he was sometimes very frustated because he could not express himself. But communication is more than speech. Our son is now mainly expressing himself with key word signing (in our case the Dutch variant SMOG) and his speech is gradually improving (at a very slow pace). I hope your daughter will also find a way to properly express herself.

[1] https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/13379/setbp1-diso...

[2] Morgan A, Braden R, Wong MMK, Colin E, Amor D, Liégeois F, Srivastava S, Vogel A, Bizaoui V, Ranguin K, Fisher SE, van Bon BW. Speech and language deficits are central to SETBP1 haploinsufficiency disorder. Eur J Hum Genet. 2021 Aug;29(8):1216-1225.

[3] https://www.setbp1.org/