Display Your Speech In Realtime To Help Lipreaders In The Mask Era

Masks are all well and good when it comes to reducing the spread of deadly pathogens, but they can make it harder to understand people when they speak. They also make lipreading impossible. [Kevin Lewis] set about building something to help.

The system consists of a small screen that can be worn on the chest or other part of the body, and a lapel microphone to record the wearer’s speech. Using the Deepgram AI speech recognition API running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the system decodes the speech and displays it on the Hyperpixel screen.

The API is quite capable, and can be set to only respond to the wearer’s voice, or in a group mode, display speech from multiple people in the area, displaying other voices in another colour. There’s also a translation feature using the iTranslateApp API as well.

It’s a neat tool that could be of great use in conferences or in situations where a quick simple machine translation could majorly ease communication. Video after the break.

Masks making it hard to understand people either audibly or because you rely on lip reading? Just got this hacked together – it displays my speech in real time with @DeepgramAI! pic.twitter.com/lPu4CZboIk

— Kevin Lewis (he/him) (@_phzn) January 4, 2022