Frequently asked questions

What is the Speech Accessibility Project?

The Speech Accessibility Project is an interdisciplinary initiative with one shared goal: to improve speech technology for people with a range of diverse speech patterns and disabilities. Led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with support from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the project brings together technologists, academic researchers and community organizations to create the diverse speech data needed to make spoken interfaces more accessible for everyone.

Why is the Speech Accessibility Project important?

Speech recognition is a powerful tool to make technology more accessible in our daily lives, especially for people with disabilities. However, it is not fully accessible for many people with speech disabilities.

Speech recognition is powered by machine learning, and without diverse, representative data, machine learning models cannot learn how to understand a diversity of speech. This project aims to change that by creating the dataset needed to more effectively train these machine learning models.

Instead of separate and duplicative initiatives by different companies and research teams, the groups are collaborating on this project to gather a set of high-quality, representative speech samples that are accelerating the technologies that support these communities of people with diverse speech patterns.

Who benefits from the Speech Accessibility Project?

Millions of people are benefitting from diverse and inclusive speech recognition. This may include but isn’t limited to people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and a wide range of medical and non-medical conditions that affect speech.

Why are so many companies supporting the Speech Accessibility Project?

The companies supporting the Speech Accessibility Project — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft — each have longstanding accessibility commitments that include delivering products, services and experiences for people from a wide range of communities and backgrounds.

This one-of-a-kind collaboration is rooted in the belief that inclusive speech recognition should be a universal experience. Working together on the Speech Accessibility Project is a way to provide the best and most expedient path to inclusive speech recognition solutions.

What is the role of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign?

Illinois is leading the Speech Accessibility Project, managing data collection and curation, privacy, authenticity and equitable access for researchers. With programs in computer science, speech, hearing, linguistics and accessibility, Illinois not only has a historic commitment to disability inclusion, but the expertise needed to make the project a success. The project is happening at the university's Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which brings together researchers across disciplines to solve problems and break technological barriers.

How does the Speech Accessibility Project work with the disability community?

University and industry partners work closely with disability community organizations to identify areas of need, recruit participants, review the participation and consent process and get feedback on how the project can be improved over time.

How can I participate?

We are currently screening potential participants via the Speech Accessibility App. Each participant works with a mentor to record speech samples. We are recruiting adult participants from the United States and Puerto Rico. Because of state privacy laws, residents of Illinois, Washington and Texas are not currently eligible to participate. We're currently recruiting people with Parkinson's, Down syndrome, ALS, cerebral palsy and those who have had a stroke.

Will I be compensated?

Participants will receive a total of $180 in three increments: $60 after recording the 200th sample, an additional $60 after recording the 400th sample and an additional $60 after recording the 600th sample. Our payment comes in the form of Amazon eCodes.

Named caregivers assisting participants will be compensated with up to $90 in Amazon eCodes as follows: $30 after recording the 200th sentence, an additional $30 after recording the 400th sentence and an additional $30 after recording the 600th sentence.

How do participants contribute?

Volunteer participants record speech samples, for example, by reading text prompts, or by answering questions out loud. The questions include things like, “How would you spend a rainy day?” or “What are your hobbies?”

The texts that volunteer project participants read, and the questions they respond to, were developed in collaboration with focus groups and disability community organizations in order to make sure we’re collecting data that's helping researchers create datasets to more effectively train speech recognition technologies.

How long does it take to participate?

It takes different people different amounts of time to complete the project. Some people finish in a few days. For others, it may take a week or more. Participants read 10 sets of about 45 sentences each, although the sets don’t have to be completed all at once. Some of the prompts ask participants to read a specific sentence. Some are open-ended and ask participants to answer questions with general information. As participants read through the sets (and caregivers assist them), we’ll email them Amazon gift cards at certain points throughout the process.

When will I see the results of this project?

The Speech Accessibility Project is a multi-year research initiative. However, each of the companies supporting the Speech Accessibility Project is committed to leveraging project data to make improvements within their respective voice recognition products and services.

The project is already sending de-identified data to its corporate sponsors and sharing with other researchers, companies and universities that have signed the project's data use agreement.

How is the data generated by the Speech Accessibility Project collected and stored?

The University of Illinois maintains a secure, private and encrypted tool to store and access the Speech Accessibility Project’s research data. Participant data is be de-identified to protect each participant’s privacy and personal information.

Is the data available to other researchers?

Yes. The goal for this project is to support a range of efforts to make voice recognition technology more useful for people with a diversity of speech patterns or disabilities. The de-identified data is available to researchers and developers, in keeping with the university's data use agreement.

Is the data available for commercial development?

The data can be used for commercial development, but the data itself cannot be distributed to any entity that hasn't signed the data use agreement.