The Hungarian Aspect of the History of Visual Speech Evaluation in the Education of the Hearing Impaired

Hégely Gábor, Kocsor András

Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

With the financial aid of the Hungarian Ministry of Education (IKTA Grant No. 00051/2001) a new computer aided software package, the „SpeechMaster” was developed for speech impediment therapy. The program for therapy use is freely available in the Internet at www.inf.u-szeged.hu. The substance of it is a real-time phoneme recognizer, which converts the sounds into easily comprehensive graphical elements such as flickering graphemes. This effect efficiently support the development of the correct articulation of hearing impaired. Since the application of visual speech techniques is an old notion, we decided to review the history of such developments. After the review section we highlight the significance of our result, which is – based on the history – may become more emphatic.