Intel releases Stephen Hawking’s speech software to public for free

For nearly 20 years, Intel has been building technology to help Stephen Hawking communicate with the world – and now the company is making the same software the world renowned physicist uses to write books, give speeches and talk available to everybody. Its source code and installation instructions are available on GitHub.

Intel is calling the advanced software package “Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit”.

All in all, the project’s public release is a great step forward to achieving Professor Hawking’s dream of making connected wheelchair and assistive computer technology to every person that needs it.

Having produced the system that allows Hawking – who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – to communicate using small facial movements, the computer giant has released the relevant software as a downloadable toolkit. In Hawking’s case, the software tracks movement of his cheek muscle.

The version of the program now used by Hawking employs a webcam which can interpret facial cues and translate those cues into words. “Our vision is to enable any developer or researcher who can bring in value in sensing, UI, word prediction, context awareness, etc.to build on top of this, and not have to reinvent the wheel since it is a large effort to do this”.

Intel hopes the developers will help create other interfaces for users with different constraints than those of Stephen Hawking. A detailed user guide is available here; fair warning: ACAT works only on PCs running Windows 7 or higher. It supports input methods including cameras, laser tracking sensors, push buttons, infrared switches and more.

“We have been busy building different sensors and trying this out with patients”, Intel principal engineer Lama Nachman told Wired.