Emilios Halamandaris, co-founder and director of INNOETICS, and Nasos Katsamanis, researcher of the Athena RC and co-founder of beenotes, introduced us to speech synthesis (text-to-speech) and speech recognition (speech-to-text) technologies. In the first part of the seminar – “Look, I can do it without a screen!”, Emilios Halamandaris presented us with the concepts and applications/solutions offered by synthetic speech technology and the conversion of text into speech, facilitating the daily life of people with reading difficulties as well as the way we communicate with computers.
In the second part – “Look, I can do it without a keyboard!”, Nasos Katsamanis talked to us about speech recognition technology, i.e. the conversion of speech into text, and gave examples of the use and application of this technology by professionals, people with mobility difficulties, or all of us in our home environment or mobile phones.