Communication aid system for hearing impaired people

The tactile channel is the only communication channel available for the speech and deaf-blind people. The common used communication methods are based on a hand contact between the handicapped person and the others; this communication is obviously possible only at short distance. Another communication method is based on the Braille code; this is possible only if both the parties in conversation have a dedicated terminal namely, the handicapped perdon a Braille terminal and the other a terminal for data transmission. In this paper we describe a system that allows a handicapped person to make a telephone communication. The system uses speech processing technologies. Current technology of speech processing allows the automatic text-to-speech convertion with good quality and the automatic recognition of spoken words with low error rates for limited vocabulary (hundred words) and connected speech.