As evidenced by my recent story on California’s text-to-911 system, the power of voice is a double-edged sword. On one hand, voice-based technology can be incredibly accessible (and convenient) for people with disabilities to do things like, for instance, control their smart home setup. On the other hand, however, having to talk on the telephone or shout into the either at one’s genie-in-a-box of a virtual assistant can prove excruciatingly difficult for many people, myself very much included, who cope with speech delays such as a stutter or something.
Worse still, if the feedback I’ve received on my aforementioned 911 piece is any indication, it’s that the majority of people take their ability to fluently communicate for granted. Since I published my story, I’ve heard from many who have shared they never thought about speech impairments being problematic in accessing emergency services.
Unsurprising yet disheartening. It’s like death by a thousand cuts.
Count Tobias Dengel as another who has thought deeply about voice technology and accessibility. Dengel is president of software company WillowTree and author of the newly-published The Sound of the Future, a book about why Dengel believes voice technology is “the next big thing” in the industry. In an interview with me conducted last month via videoconference, Dengel told me he believes the advent of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, coupled with existing voice tech, is really pushing the industry forward so as to get ever closer to making Star Trek fantasies a reality. Accessibility, he added, is a “core piece of that evolution” for disabled people who rely on assistive technology.
“Having a device that was always on [and] always with you, with all these capabilities, had a lot of positive impacts on accessibility to the digital world,” Dengel said. “We think voice is going to be a step forward in terms of accelerating accessibility in all sorts of different ways.”
Hearkening back to what I wrote in the lede regarding contacting 911, Dengel told me he feels most people “don’t sufficiently” think about technology with enough aperture. The lens through which people, media and consumers alike, view technology is far too narrow. Dengel cited most think of technology as how technically impressive it is, as with 3D-capable TVs and the current crop of AI chatbots. What is missed, he said, the human cost of technology: who’s better served, how lives are made better, and the like. Accessibility is crucial to that equation; it’s all the more concerning considering disabled people make up a quarter of the population, making us the largest marginalized and underrepresented group on the planet. We’re the majority of the minority groups.
“It’s [accessibility] usually not a top consideration, or even a consideration at all, when we look at how fast things are going to be adopted, that’s a miss in two ways,” Dengel said of the lack of knowledge in accessibility. “One, it’s a miss [in] that it misses the humanity of it. But the second is, it misses really important markets as well.”
The biggest problem with the lack of awareness of accessibility, and of disability matters writ large, is the dynamism and abstractness inherent to accessibility. Dengel called the topic “so broad,” telling me it can be hard for people to wrap their heads around what accessibility truly is because it means so many different things. This is exacerbated by the sobering reality that most people have little, if any, personal connection to disability. Unless individually impacted or adjacently so through the experiences of a loved one, accessibility isn’t relatable. When Dengel tells people about his job and the work his company does for the disability community, it (predictably) doesn’t elicit much of a reaction from others.
“I think, like [talking about] a lot of things in life, it’s [discussing accessibility] about giving good examples and telling the story behind those examples,” he said. “When you talk about it in the abstract, it’s just hard for people to understand.”
Dengel praised Apple in its work in “leading the way” in the accessibility realm, what with pioneering Siri with the iPhone 4S in 2011 and its robust suite of accessibility software across its panoply of platforms. Dengel complimented Apple succinctly, saying the company “gets it in theory and in practice.” As to voice technology specifically, he said its impact will be most felt not here in the United States, but elsewhere in the world. Dengel believes voice tech will be most appreciable in certain parts of India and Africa, for example, where literacy is a constant battle. As mobile devices like smartphones grow in ubiquity in these regions, he said, people there can translate their technical literacy to actual functional literacy. It not only gives them greater access to the world, but access to a better life in terms of job skills and more opportunities.
All told, the work done by tech titans in Apple and Google in making their products accessible—voice tech included—to everyone will have an indelible impact of all people, at home and in places across the world.
“It’s exciting to see what more they [Apple and Google] will do down the road, because I think, for both of them, [accessibility] is a big talking point right now and a big point of emphasis to make their devices as as accessible as they can,” Dengel said.
Asked about his visions of the future, especially those around voice technologies, Dengel expressed optimism. He said he can see a world in which voice tech and generative AI tools are mashed together, such that a person could interact with, say, ChatGPT with only their voice. Furthermore, he believes such a product will mark a “complete reinvention” of how we interact with not merely chatbots, but technology in general. Apps will need to be torn down and rewritten to take advantage of the ever-burgeoning capabilities of artificial intelligence and voice technology. Over the next few years, Dengel said, “the whole interface between humans and machines is going to get reset.” Of course, accessibility plays a part in that revolution. Dengel went on to tell me there’s a “collective opportunity to take accessibility into account” earlier and with more frequency than ever before as technology’s future grows.
Rather than take a few years as in the previous revolution with the internet, Dengel is hopeful accessibility will be embraced by developers as they start tackling questions on how to build for the future.
In the weeks following our conversation, the aforementioned book from Dengel was released last week. Elsewhere, his company in WillowTree also recently announced its Vocable app, available on iOS and Android. The software is an AAC, or augmented and alternative communication, tool that leverages the conversational nature of ChatGPT to create a “more intuitive and impactful method of communication” for those who are non-verbal or who have limited ability to speak vocally. The app debuted in 2020 after a WillowTree designer’s partner was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder which left her paralyzed and unable to speak. At a high level, Vocable can be seen as an alternative to what WillowTree described as ”expensive, bulky, rudimentary, or outdated” AAC devices. According to WillowTree, the average cost of a dedicated AAC device is an exorbitant $15,000.
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