Abstract
Mobile technology is very fast growing and incredible, yet there are not much technology development and improvement for Deaf-mute peoples. Existing mobile applications use sign language as the only option for communication with them. Before our article, no such application (app) that uses the disrupted speech of Deaf-mutes for the purpose of social connectivity exists in the mobile market. The proposed application, named as vocalizer to mute (V2M), uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) methodology to recognize the speech of Deaf-mute and convert it into a recognizable form of speech for a normal person. In this work mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) based features are extracted for each training and testing sample of Deaf-mute speech. The hidden Markov model toolkit (HTK) is used for the process of speech recognition. The application is also integrated with a 3D avatar for providing visualization support. The avatar is responsible for performing the sign language on behalf of a person with no awareness of Deaf-mute culture. The prototype application was piloted in social welfare institute for Deaf-mute children. Participants were 15 children aged between 7 and 13 years. The experimental results show the accuracy of the proposed application as 97.9%. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of results also revealed that face-to-face socialization of Deaf-mute is improved by the intervention of mobile technology. The participants also suggested that the proposed mobile application can act as a voice for them and they can socialize with friends and family by using this app.