VoxAid 2006: Telephone Communication for Hearing and/or Vocally Impaired People Bálint Tóth, Géza Németh Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics (TMIT), Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), Magyar Tudósok körútja 2., 1117 Budapest, Hungary {toth.b, nemeth}@tmit.bme.hu Abstract. Speech and/or hearing impaired people have difficulties with voice communication. In case of face-to-face conversation they can find a common communication channel (e.g. sign language, paper, etc.), but without an appropriate system they are unable to talk over the phone. The goal of the present study is to introduce the design and development steps of a system for vocally and/or hearing impaired people, which helps them to communicate via telephone with any person. Speech output is realized by text-to-speech (TTS) technology and speech input is provided by automatic speech recognition (ASR). The visual and the speech user interfaces enable users on both side of the phone line (a speech and hearing impaired person at one end, a non-speech- and-hearing-disabled person at the other end) to communicate. 1. Introduction In the telecommunication world new technologies have been developed and released so rapidly as never before, which changes everyday life. Unfortunately the demands of disabled users are rarely considered during the development phase. Present and future technologies of telecommunication enable impaired persons to achieve a better standard of living. However if their special demands are not considered and if they are not involved in the development phase they can end up in a very hard situation. The number of severely speech impaired persons is about two million, and the number of severely hearing impaired people is around six million in the European Union [1]. One can loose his/her ability to speak and/or to hear because of illness (e.g. stroke), physical impact (e.g. accident, surgery) or s/he might be already born as an impaired person. Impaired hearing and speech causes many difficulties for the disabled person and also a lot of efforts for her/his environment (e.g. family). The lack of the above- mentioned abilities may also result in social and psychological problems. Therefore a communication aid, which enables conversations over the phone for vocally and hearing impaired persons, can help them not only in everyday life, but it also helps them to approach the standard of living of non-disabled persons. The aim of the present study is to investigate the possible user groups, to analyze previous assistive methods and devices for hearing and speech impaired persons, to