THE Scott Morgan Foundation launched on Wednesday, as part of the AI Summit in New York, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that helps people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) who suffer from a certain type of speech disorder being able to communicate seamlessly with other people through human avatars.
The platform, called SMF (Scott-Morgan Foundation) VoXAIuses AI through various agents that restore the natural flow of conversation for people with serious communication disordersparticularly those with ALS, and creates an avatar that replicates their face that speaks and gestures as the person would if they did not have the disease.
The program uses Nvidia and Lenovo technologies which allow us to use these people’s voices and their knowledge base to replicate the way they would communicate if they did not have speech, writing or breathing problems. translate it to a normal conversational level.
Students from partner university Tecnológico de Monterrey spent more than 400 hours each developing and testing the program, also conducting the first empirical research into how expressive avatars improve communication.
Leah Stavenhagen, the visible face of the project
Leah is the main ambassador and visible face of the SMF VoXAI project, and says that ALS is not a disease that only affects older menbut also many young people like her.
At 26, Léa was living a full life in Paris; about to work for a major consulting firm after graduating from college, in love with her fiancé, an avid swimmer, and spending her summers with her family in Michigan.
But in the spring of 2019, the life she had carefully planned took an unexpected turn and she was diagnosed with ALS.
“In many ways, these first months were the most difficult. I knew that things had changed forever and that the future would be very different from what I had imagined, but my mind couldn’t comprehend it. “How could I have been so close to the end when, physically, so little had changed? he explains.
“The biggest impact was the enormous distance I felt from my peers. I just wanted to liveso conversations about work or weekend plans seemed extremely trivial to me,” he adds.
More than 7,000 experts and companies discuss the transformative role of artificial intelligence in business, highlighting its implementation, sustainability and ethical challenges at the AI Summit in New York, taking place today and tomorrow.
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