For the first time this solution will provide an objective measurement of the effectiveness/efficiency of the therapies adopted in the various qualitative/quantitative applications on a patient’s phonological and articulatory pathologies. The application can also be used to develop programs of articulatory exercises to be carried out under the supervision and management, in person  or remotely, of the speech therapist, especially in adult disartrice patients and in children with language delay.

Mediavoice, aware of the useful pervasiveness of the latest developments in voice technology and artificial intelligence, intends to expand its spectrum of solutions, bringing to an ever-increasing target of patients/users the services enabled by new technologies.

For this purpose we collaborate with the company CLOUDWISE for the technological side and with the BIOMEDICAL CAMPUS, both from a medical point of view thanks to the UOS of Integrated Therapies of Otolaryngory and from a point of view of technology transfer thanks to the Research Unit of Processing and Bioinformatics Systems, the COSBI unit.

With a primary Google Partner we have developed a digital media plan with a personalized strategy inspired by our market and our objectives, the creation and launch of specifically segmented campaigns and their optimizations. Through the Google AdWords / AdSense platform, a search engine used by more than 90% of Italian users, it was decided to operate through the Search Network ads and other related strategies, useful for the goal.

The purpose of the HR4SC project is the creation of a service / product oriented to the collection, classification, updating and interaction in natural language of data relating to the state of the road surface. The algorithm that carries out the classification is called RCC (i.e., Road Condition Classification). The system identifies this state through the algorithm currently under international patenting, assigning the relative level of quality and creating a database that grows and feeds itself constantly and continuously over time.

The system is mainly aimed at:

1. Citizens: to move and travel in safety and comfort also thanks to advanced interaction based on the latest technologies: automatic voice technology and artificial intelligence;
2. Public administration: to monitor, manage and plan road network maintenance;
3. Insurance: to improve the risk assessment of its policyholders;
4. Car Manufacturers: to provide additional high value-added services to their customers.

The service collects information on the state of the road surface, identifies instability and produces the relative classification (from absence of instability to serious instability). The aim of the project is also and above all to create a centralized database containing information on the mapping of the road profile at national level accessible online to all through the various digital channels.

This information is useful both for the end user and for the bodies responsible for the management of the road surface as it allows them to better schedule maintenance interventions. The service is based on two main components, an application (Mobile App) residing on the user’s device and an application for server-side data processing.

The Mobile App has two main features:

1. Collect and send the telemetry data, recorded by the device, to the Cloud environment of the Project;
2. Receive from the Cloud Environment the data of disruptions in a certain radius around the user to warn him of any critical issues, interacting with him in natural language.

The selected place for this project experimentation is the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The end user will be able to access the platform also remotely and thanks to the multimedia contents (such as video-guides LIS, audio-guides, etc.), the visually impaired, the blind and the deaf community will still be able to visit the MAXXI and, even if they do not go physically on the spot, they will experience the visit as if the museum was coming to them. In this sense, for elderly and frail people, the tool will allow easier access to the digital channels, allowing, in the case of the elderly, to also live an experience linked to new technologies, trying to bridge the gap between the elderly themselves and the new technologies. We can also think of grandchildren who, with the tools implemented by the project, help a grandfather with sight difficulties to use the museum, but also to become familiar with digital tools.
Thanks to a specially created APP, it will be possible to travel through the 12 stations located between the hall and Gallery 5 of MAXXI, discovering their architecture with the support of typhlo-didactic materials, audio descriptions, video guides in Italian and International Sign Language, videos and audio recordings of the exploration of the participant-narrators. The APP, which can also be used remotely, is designed as an accessible and inclusive tool, easy to use not only by blind people through voice commands and by deaf ones thanks to the contents in LIS and IS but also by those who are not familiar with digital technologies.
The platform, in addition to making the museum contents produced by the project team usable, can be enriched by the contents of the museum visitors with their own contributions, to return a “travel diary” of the participated, collective and multi-voiced MAXXI visitors.
Project team: MAXXI Foundation, Mediavoice S.r.l, DSTech S.r.l, Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired – territorial section of Rome, National Deaf Organization Onlus, Architalab, Lucky’s Pr., National Federation of Pro Blind Institutions.

Today in Italy alone there are about 350,000 Blind and 1.5 million the Visually Impaired. In Europe this number grows to about 15 million and, in the world, to about 250 million. Visually impaired people are constantly increasing in relation to the prolongation of the average life span.

Because of their condition they all suffer from the digital divide even if they can be framed into two groups: a minority who knows how to use computers (using software called ‘screen readers’) and those who, a strong majority, are not equipped with these skills.

The i4ALL project, an absolute innovation, aims to develop a software that allows the blind or visually impaired user without computer skills to navigate by voice on any website.

The unskilled blind or visually impaired user will therefore simply access the web and browse any website by speaking, thus increasing his autonomy, information and cultural level.

This type of user has the greatest need for these technologies which are now finally able to bring a significant improvement in his quality of life.

In this context, the EasyTV system aims not only to facilitate access to multimedia services, offering new media delivery mechanisms, but also go one step further, by improving interaction based on a multilingual approach and adapting it to the preferences of the user, providing custom content on a single integrated multi-terminal platform. Specifically, EasyTV will be based on four pillars:

• a) Improving access services for enhancing the multimedia audio-visual experience for people with disabilities.
• b) Improving personalization of the content and its interaction, towards a hyperpersonal experience for everyone.
• c) New technologies to break the sign language barrier (based on crowdsourcing techniques).
• d) Improving and developing speech and gesture/looking recognition to control the TV set and TV applications (e.g., eye movement or head movement) in the form of a universal remote control.

Different tests with users will establish close cooperation through the exchange of experiences between different partners and user groups, in order to enhance the evaluation and validation process of EasyTV technology.

The objective of EasyTV is to promote greater availability of accessible media for everyone and provide equal access to audiovisual services for all users, especially for people with varying degrees of disability (focused on visual, hearing and mobility problems). The project aims to develop improved access services for communication media and make the distribution of new accessibility features with an improved visual and sound multimedia experience be more profitable, more flexible and easier to use. EasyTV aims to innovate and implement huge advances in breaking the language barrier for all by developing technologies that can improve interacting and perform sign language translations towards an inclusive communication interaction. At its core, EasyTV is an improved personalization of the content you experience and its interaction, towards a hyperpersonal experience for everyone.

To ensure an appropriate impact, the project’s approach is designed to create an information society for all, towards a Europe that is free of barriers for people with disabilities.

The project is coordinated by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and in addition to CCMA, the collaborators are the Fundación Confederación Nacional Sordos España (CNSE) para la supresión de barreras de comunicación, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), and Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA and MEDIAVOICE SRL (from Italy); and Ethniko Kentro Erevnas Kai Technologikis Anaptyxis (CERTH) and ARX.NET S.A, from Greece.

The project idea is based on different common considerations to our country and to the rest of Europe.

The first is of a general nature and is based on the value of cultural tourism in Europe and in Italy. At a European level, and especially at an Italian level, the income generated by cultural tourism exceeds 335 billion Euros per year and plays a very important role in the tourism industry. Around 9 million jobs are connected to the Cultural Heritage while the conservation area market is estimated to be around 5 billion Euro (http://goo.gl/IV8qYc). In Italy, the available data shows that 36% of the total amount of incoming visitors, choose the cities of art, while cultural heritage and art are reasons for travelling for over 60% of the tourists (http://www.ontit.it).

The second consideration has to do with the crucial importance of this sector to the local economy and with the great changes the tourist is going through. The tourist has in fact became a highly evolved consumer, independent from intermediaries, able to organize his own holiday, looking for personalized services and more oriented towards short stays. This evolution leads also to a strong diversification of travel types, with the creation of new vertical market niches (fine dining and drinking destinations, eco tourism, etc.) and frequent combinations among these different tourism types.

A third consideration relates to the complex difficulties in preserving the Cultural Heritage. Countries are called to be responsible and protect their patrimony. This duty has been combined with the effort of creating balanced managing systems able to enhance the potential that these resources can offer from a point of view of economic growth and competitivity of territories, without ceasing to protect them.

It ‘s a three years project valued at 7,6 million Euros where Mediavoice leads 13 other companies, among them HP Italy, Loquendo, University of Rome and Palermo, Fondazione Bordoni and CNR. It is based on a new device engineered by Mediavoice called Mouse Acutattile. Already patented in Italy, it is now waiting to be patented internationally.

This project has result in the development of a prototype of Mobile App that allows the user, typically blind or visually impaired, to browse the web independently using voice controls. The mechanism used by the software works as an automatic syntactic extractor of web content. This extractor works with any websites built with markup language (HTLM5, HTML4, XHTML) and it is more efficient when the websites comply with the W3C-WAI(Web Accessibility Initiative) reccomandations.

Brief description of the project:
• The company: Mediavoice S.r.l. is a small innovation and engineering company operating in the voice technology market, specializing in technology from the outset
assisted. Mediavoice’s mission is to simplify the man-machine interface thanks to the use of voice technology for access to the digital world, with particular
focus in the field of assistive technologies (technologies inclusive of disabilities) for the blind and visually impaired.
• Coherence with regional planning: Mediavoice is a small company strongly oriented towards research and innovation. The international launch will allow to acquire
a lever, a multiplier of cultural and financial energy, which will enable a further boost to its innovative capacity. In that sense this project is perfectly
consistent with one of the principles of the regional strategy which sees internationalization as an accelerator of innovation.
• The product: it is a suite of products, subject of the internationalization plan, called Speaky Facile, now in version 4.0. Speaky Facile is a service platform
based on a special portable Personal Computer equipped with a scanner and other devices, designed for blind and visually impaired users who do not use the PC today because
too complex or not accessible to people without computer knowledge. It is extremely innovative and unique on the market today as it brings a
fundamental novelty: it allows the user to use all the applications contained in it through the voice, without having to use a keyboard, whether Braille or not.
• The internationalization strategy: after numerous sector studies and after analyzing the statistical data of this market for various countries, it was decided to start the
internationalization process with Spain and China. A preliminary analysis has already been carried out for Spain. In Spain, the problem of blindness is certainly a lot
felt as there are about 979,200 people with visual impairments of various kinds (from 6 years of age upwards), of which about 920,900 are visually impaired and 58,300 are blind, for
a total of 2.14% of the resident population. The company has already identified a first potential partner for Spain which is ONCE (OrganizacionNacionalCiegos de
España), which is a public body that holds a sort of “monopoly” for everything related to the placing on the market of typhlotechnical products, and it is precisely this
organization that we want to address and propose ourselves as business partners.
• Expected results: to activate commercial partnerships, exclusively for each country, in Spain through ONCE (and then, following the related analysis, in China) and to sell the
produced at a price of 1,500 euros, dividing the profit margins 50% with commercial partners. We plan to replicate this business model in other countries in the
following years.
Project Web Site (in Italian)

SPEAKY for Robots (S4R) aims at fostering the definition and deployment of voice user interfaces (VUIs) in robotic applications where human-robot interaction is required. S4R promotes speech technologies transfer towards manufacturing processes, to provide semi-automatic speech-based interface development for robotic platforms. This in turn will boost up the robot presence in manifold activities, by supporting a natural interaction with humans. S4R’s specific goal is a novel Robotic Voice Development Kit (RVDK). A RVDK is conceived as an interactive environment aiding designers to define the voice interface according to the desired application requirements. In order to design and implement the RVDK, state of the art solutions about lexical vocabularies and knowledge representation to capture the semantics of the domain, and natural language processing technologies will be integrated. S4R targets two possible application domains: Home services, where a user controls a humanoid robot through a voice user interface, and outdoor robotic surveillance, where the user is controlling the action of a wheeled robot capable of navigating in rough terrain.

Speaky for Robot, sviluppato con Uniroma1, ha permesso la definizione e lo sviluppo di nuove interfacce vocali UOMO-MACCHINA specifiche per applicazioni robotiche. Nell’ambito di questo progetto è stato realizzato un innovativo kit di sviluppo robotico (RVDK – Robot Voice Developr Kit), che supporta gli sviluppatori nella progettazione di interfacce utente vocali per i Robot. L’RVDK è stato concepito come un ambiente di sviluppo che permette ai progettisti di definire le interfacce vocali in base ai requisiti applicativi desiderati; quindi, è adattabile a diversi campi di applicazione. Le interfacce prodotte dall’ RVDK sono integrate automaticamente nella piattaforma Speaky per l’interazione via voce tra utente e Robot nel dominio per cui sono state progettate.

Within this project, the Speaky PC Facile product of the future is created. It is a project that creates the architectural prototype and the mechanism for using TTS (Text To Speech) and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) speech resources in Virtualized environments. Thanks to the virtualization of hardware and software resources, cloud computing and the addition of voice technology to these two worlds, it will be possible to have systems on the server side that contain all the application logic remotely and enable a stupid terminal, therefore extremely cheap, on the server side. client. This terminal will perform the simple function of accessing the service that is created, enhanced and maintained on the server side. The Speaky PC Facile of the day after tomorrow, therefore, is no longer hardware with software on board, it will be a service (Software As a Service), which will be distributed to the blind and visually impaired (and not only) at the cost of a ‘reduced’ monthly fee. At home, the user will only have a stupid terminal that does not need to be maintained and updated, it will be all server-side, with the additional feature of supporting virtualized speech recognition and synthesis, with an architecture based on a pending patent.

This project aims to create a voice interface for a story telling system in the Cultural Heritage field.

EDI is a new inclusive platform for digital publishing enhanced by voice interaction and virtualization. The project consists of the production of a series of innovative instruments for digital publishing accessibile through different hardware and software systems both for Desktop and Mobile.