Google to use AI to help disabled communicate

Google researchers are working to train its speech recognition system to understand people with speech impairments.

The company showcased its Project Euphonia Tuesday during its annual developers conference in Mountain View, California.

Project Euphonia is working with people who have neurological conditions including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, to better understand their speech patterns. The researchers hope to train the system to reliably transcribe the speech to better help people communicate.

Google also announced an update that will help people type one side of a phone conversation on a keyboard and have words quickly translated into speech.

To help people who cannot speak, the company revealed a button that will connect to Google Assistant to allow people to send simple commands without speaking.

Other announcements at the conference include that the company will allow users of its digital maps to cloak their identities to prevent their locations from being recorded.

The new privacy control called “Incognito” is being offered by Google as tech companies face intensifying scrutiny over the amount of user information they collect and sell for advertising. Facebook dedicated much of its own conference last week to connecting people though more private channels rather than broadly on the social network.

Incognito has long been offered on various browsers, including Google’s Chrome, though that may get overridden when people sign in to a Google or other account.

Google also showed off recently announced auto-delete features. The tools let people set a time limit for how long their location history will be saved before it is deleted.

The announcements came Tuesday during Google’s developers conference in Mountain View, California.

Google says its artificial intelligence assistant will get a series of updates this year, including one that lets it book rental cars and movie tickets for you.

Google says Assistant will be able to book cars and tickets using online forms on Android phones later this year. The technology behind this, called Duplex, was released last year amid much fanfare and some worries about its ability to sound creepily human when calling restaurant to make reservations.

Assistant will also be shrunk down on new Pixel phones later this year to a size that lets it understand and respond to some commands without sending information to Google’s servers.

The AI is also learning to offer more personal suggestions to users by learning common contact names and addresses.

Google announced the updates at its annual developers conference Tuesday in Mountain View, California.