Deaf chat: A speech-to-text communication aid for hearing deficiency

Hearing impairments have a negative impact in the lives of individuals living with them and those around such individuals. Different applications and technological tools have been developed to help reduce this negative impact. Most mobile applications that have been developed that use Speech-to-Text technology have been inconsistent such that they are not inclusive of all types of hearing impaired individuals, only work under specifically predefined environments and do not support conversations with multiple participants. This makes the present tools less effective and makes hearing impaired participants feel like they are not completely part of the conversation. This paper presents a model that aims to address this by introducing the use of Multiple-Speaker Classification technology in the design of mobile applications for hearing impaired people. Furthermore we present a prototype of a mobile application called Deaf Chat that uses the newly designed model. A survey was conducted in order to evaluate the potential that this application has to address the needs of hearing-impaired people. The results of the evaluation presented a good user acceptance and proved that a platform like Deaf Chat could be useful for the greater good of those who have hearing impairment.