Avaz

32 Pages·2012·0.93 MB·English

by  Ajit Narayanan

Avaz
a case study of India’s first
experience with hi-tech
AAC
Ajit Narayanan
Invention Labs | www.avaz.in
[email protected]
In today’s talk:
1. The context and background of Avaz
2. The Avaz experiment
3. What we learnt about AAC in India
4. Directions for future research
Avaz is India’s first AAC device. It is primarily
targeted at moderate- to high-functioning
children with Cerebral Palsy and autism.
Avaz was born at the Silent Revolution
conference in 2005 in India.
A 3-day conference in Chennai, India brought
together technologists, designers, special-ed
professionals, therapists and caregivers.
The aim was to build affordable AAC
devices, brought to market by Indian
entrepreneurs, and seed the AAC ecosystem in
India.
The Avaz timeline
• 2005: Silent Revolution. Avaz is
conceptualized, codenamed ‘KAVI’
• 2007: Invention Labs is started up, product
development begins on Avaz.
• 2008: Engineering design begins
• 2009: First prototypes piloted
• 2010 Feb: Avaz Beta is launched
• 2011 May: Avaz 1.0 is launched.
About Avaz: early prototype
– Text-based
– No touch-screen, only switches
2009
An early prototype of Avaz (switches only) A screenshot of Avaz – optimized for scanning
About Avaz: Avaz beta
– Introduced picture systems
– Introduced touchscreen
– Multi-lingual
2010
Avaz beta – templates mode Avaz beta – scanning
About Avaz: Avaz 1.0
– Built on Android
– Runs on a tablet device
– Introduced Customization tool (PC-based)
2011
The Avaz tablet (picture mode) Avaz PC-based customization tool
About Avaz: ‘FreeSpeech’
– Multilingual language modeling
2011
*
FreeSpeech (English)
* Released in limited pilots only
About Avaz: ‘FreeSpeech’
– Multilingual language modeling
2011
*
FreeSpeech (Hindi)
* Released in limited pilots only
Avaz after launch
Avaz (beta) was launched commercially on Feb
26th 2010.
An experiment to study user behavior was
launched shortly thereafter, in the form of
supervised 3-month pilots at selected customer
locations.