The deaf blacksmith who married in 1576 – and the history of sign as a legal language

The medieval church’s acknowledgement that signs were equivalent to a spoken language was transformative for deaf people.
Tech Xplore

AI text-to-speech gives Manx a digital voice as speakers fall to 2,200

With only 2,200 people still speaking the Manx language, Chris Bartley is using AI text-to-speech systems to protect and showcase the heritage of endangered languages. Bartley, a School of Computer ...

This Jammer Wants to Block Always-Listening AI Wearables. It Probably Won’t Work

Deveillance’s Spectre I, developed by a recent Harvard grad, wants to give people control over the always-on wearables surrounding their lives. The problem? Physics.
IEEE

Demographic Attributes Prediction from Speech Using WavLM Embeddings

Abstract: This paper introduces a general classifier based on WavLM features, to infer demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, native language, education, and country, from speech.

How a Pittsburgh-area man developed an app that's giving people with ALS their voice back

A Pittsburgh-area man is not just giving people living with ALS a voice, he's giving them their own voice. A recent diagnosis just inspired a man with no coding experience to develop a life-changing ...