GPS and speech recognition help blind people using public transport

By at 10:18 am Thursday, Nov 18

My latest article for TheFeature is about Noppa, a neat project in Finland to help blind people navigate through cities with the aid of GPS-enabled mobile phones.
The basic user components of Noppa are a mobile phone that's loaded with speech-recognition software and a Bluetooth GPS unit. The Bluetooth connection is used to get real-time bus and train data (the kind that appears on bus stop signs and train platforms to users know when their vehicle is about to arrive). The GPRS connection accesses a custom information server that manages route planning, guidance and speech recognition. The information server also accesses maps, weather information and municipal databases from the Internet. The speech-recognition software allows the user to make verbal requests, and the system uses speech synthesis to tell the user how to get to the correct bus stop or train station and tells him or her which vehicle to board.
Link

Mark Frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

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