Protecting Your Digital Voice by Steve Lodge

thanks everyone for attending uh i know it's after lunch and thanks to my previous presenter type stuff so i'm here today to uh to give you a bit of an overview about a passion of mine uh hopefully it might uh strike a few chords with yourselves as well uh around things so bear with me it's a more of a a journey and a story rather than a sales pitch as we'll say so quick outline i'm just going to do some uh welcomes and introductions and then what we're going to look at trying to do is trying to set a scene about uh something you've lost something that's precious to you and how it makes you feel and then we'll get round to the

electronics bit of it a little bit later on so without further ado we'll go on so yeah this is my first time at b-side so thanks to jen and everybody for inviting me over thanks everybody for coming over and sitting and listening hopefully you'll find this uh reasonably entertaining and everything else so as i said it's not a sales pitch although it is related to a product that i did help create for my severely disabled son uh many many years ago time for still from just a bit about the journey that we've been on um over the last 10 years or so so as i said hopefully you'll find it thought provoking maybe challenging in a in a

in a positive way and maybe who knows inspiring and uh dare to say for my side anyway life-changing as you'll find out with me as we get through so quick introduction uh as we said i'm steve lodge i've been a um a techie since i was about 14 and working on computers and technology and electronics and software development and got into problem solving and a deep down i guess i'm a lot like many people in the room you know taking a heart with a passion trying to do stuff trying to fix things trying to make things work trying to make things better trying to protect people and all those types of things and so so

as i said i went all the way through my career eventually i had a family and you know great achievement first unborn but unfortunately for callum i found out it was really disabled and and uh [Music] and as a result uh you know we've stuck with trying to reach out to callum and what we can do about making his life better making the family's life better and everything else like that we all know about stephen hawkins and the uh the brilliance and his electorate communication device how you know the world wouldn't be uh uh where it is right now if professor hawkins didn't have the ability to express himself and come up with the theories and present those

theories etc you know there's countless tens of thousands or millions of people that not always afforded that right which is why you know i kind of came up with the speak to me concept and trying to do that there's a little picture of callum using one of his uh he speaks to me is using drag and drop texts images and text-to-speech to create words and phrases that helps him so she counts as this he guesses asking you for a drink well tell him what he eats five things and drinks one thing and he drinks pure orange juice so if you give him tea or coca-cola or whatever it is you won't drink it obviously that gets him upset

and frustrated which again is why we're looking at using technology using what's out there to give children like callum an adult site or as adults like helm is now an opportunity to express themselves so just put yourself into the position of i'm sure as we've all grown up we've lost something of value you know house keys your wallet credit cards car whatever it is just imagine how you feel when that happens you know you get a sense of dread uh you know get anxious you get stressed you get worried all those types of things probably get angry and you know yourself for whatever has happened type of thing and callum lives with that concept all the time you know he's

always in that particular mindset of you know not being able to uh to be stressed and concerned things like that so as i say you know you could potentially lose something even more valuable you know friendships relationships family life or as i say in challenge situation lose your voice so i thought the uh thing and tried to make it a bit more interactive and knowing that i got a close lunchtime slot i thought well i know we've got social distance and everything else so we'll see how this works out but i thought we'd do a quick exercise and so imagine that you wake up from a dream the dream that you were having was you've lost your voice

but the actual thing is you really have lost your voice so everyone in the room's lost their voice makes it really difficult so imagine then that you can't speak you can't write you can't text message you can't i am chat you can't draw how would you communicate how would you tell people what you what you want what you need how you feel it all those things that we take for granted all the time so just using basic pointing or objects that we've got many of the auditorium today or if you did have or mining or all those types of things remember to follow the rules if you're in person or online try and turn to the person next to you

or address it to you if you want to participate and just try tell them something about some of your favorite food where you've been on holiday tv show movie that you last saw if you ever went down one now the cinemas are open you want to give it a go

i can see some of you trying but i guess what we'll all realize is that it's really really difficult isn't it you know without an object without a point of reference without somebody to interpret using different cues and different signs it's very difficult but like i said that's the world that callum and children and adults like callum live with on a daily basis tell them to problem solve is amazing you will come up with amazing things about wanting to watch youtube that's his sign for youtube we had to figure that out but that's what he meant by youtube so when he wants to watch his youtube you might want to watch um disney scar battle sitting on youtube and he will

come up with a creative way of letting his family know that that's what he wants to try and do well that's difficult when we know what it is but if he goes to anywhere else he doesn't know they don't always know what his sign is and he's communicating so that's why i came up with kind of the concept for speak to me as i said you know we're saying that you know my ministry has a fun when it's at a party but if you have to do that constantly all the time every day of your life to get your needs met to to to do those types of things you know to do even do the basics to ask

for a drink or to go to the toilet or whatever it is you'd be struck and again you know the brother public you know 99.99 of the population don't know sign language you know i know basic sign language a b c d type of stuff i can pretty much put things together we know basic signs for market on for more various other stuff for caleb but again when you go out in public columns out and he's trying to do his sign it makes it difficult and hence that's why we kind of came up with the concept for speech only so like i said it's a communication device it's really meant to be easy to use

and uses drag and drops pictures standardized images and pictures text-to-speech engine and a simple consistent user interface which is what we wanted to try and help so that people can get familiar with it as you can see just use this little object to drag and drop so it says

lots of children and adults that have got autism and have chopping slims they tap either the hands or objects or things like that so if having an object on the screen and just tapping it all the time just pull them fill the speed up so the traditional communication devices until speaking he came along just no real good no real useful calendar because he would fill the screen up with i want i won't have what i want i want i want what i want i want that he would never get to what he really wanted there was it helped support the intentional communication which we can also get it to work with uh eye gaze so if you're in a wheelchair and

you can't use your hands for example you have a tracking for guys stuff like that you can work with various different interfaces and other hardware technologies and also you can have it in different languages usually if pictures are the universal you have it in translated into different different languages so you can have it in french or german or chinese or uh you know any that we've got out there so really what am i trying to do here is i'm just trying to give everybody a bit of a thing that says you know we're all working busy hurried lives are all challenging running around trying to do things trying to live in trying to be good people trying to help against the

black hats and everybody else type stuff like that imagine if you've got an electronic communication device that was your only means of communication and it got back to where you got whatever happened to it imagine having the benefit of hiring your voice and all of a sudden having each naturally away from you again and things like that so it's one of the things i'm really keen to try and look at and trying to make these things more resilient and better for the wider community and things of that order so what speaks to me is currently operating on windows operating system because that's what i was familiar with but ideally you know i'd love to try and

get it onto an ios and android platforms and things like that so you know reaching out to the wider community just saying this is my story it's what i've done you know this is what i'm trying to do these are all the people and individuals that are trying to help around the country and around around the world so if there's anybody out there anybody online watching uh that's uh that's got the time or talent or contacts or whatever that wants to maybe reach out to me have a conversation about it and come up with some other ideas or whatever and see if we can look at maybe trying to get that into a wider audience

i mean lots of the uk schools have invested heavily into the uh the ipad platforms and those other things of that order but you know my concept was always to try and make it you know that speak to me should be you know universally available regardless of operating system regardless of technology uh you know without getting into a sales pitch around the price point that's commercially viable and out there if you're a single mum two disabled non-verbal children on on benefits or low incomes and things like that you know really want to try and make it that you know why should those people be disadvantaged why should they not be able to be able to use

foreign that's my passion and hopefully you know others might ideally like to share that as well so that's kind of my story uh that's where i've come from any questions yeah

i did a long time ago i you know we looked at maybe that concept and you know i think we've looked at i think unity we looked at phone gap when it first came out i mean i've registered the patents back in 2009. you know we've got children that are actually using and benefiting from speaks me down in some special needs schools in london you know they were originally got a low attainment level and their targets were set at relatively modest levels but they managed to get invest in a few speakers get them out into the hands of their children and they outperformed all their targets across the board all the children that were on there because

they've been able to express i mean you imagine going to us going to a school and not being able to communicate and knowing all your all your times tables but still being taught your times for four years or two years when you already understood that the first week you were in school you know imagine how you would feel like you couldn't express that and that's what happens in a lot of cases you know children individuals get frustrated they get demotivated they have challenging behaviors as a result type of stuff and put something like speak to me or other products like that out there into the wider community should help you know do that [Music]

that's a good question i mean from my you know so you know i've been a busy geeky dad for you know 20 odd years with callum you know i've i've gone to the time to spend time learning complex manuals you know i've come from a technical background so you know that's relatively straightforward and intuitive but you know i put myself again some of the speakers i said on some of the besides topics before you know trying to keep it simple so simple user interface easy to configure consistent uh and do those types of things so you know it's it's three or four pages on the pdf that you can download

tab file effects digital time file fixes with um with you know images on there you can have pictures of photos and family friends you know i've got license agreements in place with three or three of the top four worldwide image educational image components around the world uh so they again so the children go into special needs school to get access to those particular image sets they can then use those in class they can use them consistently on their

um

yeah i mean it's certainly things that we've i've kind of done i've self-funded it all myself predominantly because yeah you know i wanted to try and monetize it but you know i've got a special needs child that eventually i'm going to stop working and eventually i will die unfortunately and you know callum will be 40 50 years old you know type of stuff and you know if there is an opportunity to actually make something put into a you know a charitable foundation or trust maybe create an opportunity where we can have you know living care centers that are based you know sponsored by i don't know a speech foundation or whatever that was my ultimate vision type of stuff

but you know i'm not holding anything off the table at the minute but uh you know i'm a single geeky dad just trying to do the best i can to try and get you know onto an ielts or an android platform which obviously you know that's you know the the new surface girls out and you know so that's that's looking encouraging and i've got it on the surface as well and lots of other things so [Music]

yeah they're the three syllables

they it's known that the the the three image sets that i so there's there's um pcs which is there's rigid symbols in the uk and the symbol sticks which is the distinct the sigma type derivative and that are used predominantly they're they're the three primary ones that are used there's also a feature exchange communication system pens symbol set and there's at the market on sign symbol set which is heavily used in lots of special needs schools but market on tend to be very conservative though when

you know so if you're going into an education environment you're likely to be using one of those one of those certainly pcs

[Music] yeah like anything else there's a there's a there's a license fee to what for each of the image sets but it's a lot easier easiest to reuse 20 30 40 000 image sets uh in images that categorized and been created and used heavily within the education sectors or whatever so again i was trying to be consistent with you know what the children or the adults are likely to use augment that by using digital photos uh you know any any any other thing that you want to import into you need to speak to me you can also record your own voice uh for example and it's versions like this accents on them when i digitize all the

voices but obviously using text-to-speech engines and computer synthesized speech you can put different accents on different dialects etc from different languages

all right yeah

straightforward yeah i mean it's a good show i mean i've tried reaching out to various different organizations in in the past i was over at uh my daughter's just started university of huddersfield and uh she went visiting for covered some of the other campuses i think my friend got quite a good digital technology center things like that but again you know it's it's just trying to find you know somebody that's you know i mean i as i said i'm a nice software developer but i've coded for like 10 or 15 years since i was looking at the process on this you know that was way about when time for stuff and you know i know it's

basically dating well basically it's some images graphical user interface takes a speech engine apart from me learning to recode again so things like that which you know i'm still going through my side institute assignments and security certifications so maybe maybe next year i'll get on to coding again time today but i've never given up type of thing and that's one of the things that we probably should all take away is you know still believe in the great idea concept how we can help people how it can change lives and and hopefully one day it'll be a lot more devices helping a lot more individuals around the world

yeah i mean i mean there's the the hearing community we've engaged with i've worked with uh basically speaking language before uh some years ago and again what we're trying to do is just get the get the device out there get the antidotes i mean now it's in some of the special knee schools in london and various other places they've provided some brilliant testimonies and an evidence base about how it's reduced behaviors how it's increased determines how it's you know it's opened up the educational pathways to children uh especially these children and things of that order so you know again i said all along i'm more than happy to to work and take contributions from wherever time so you

know it's great to get an opportunity to come out and present and you know even if you can't help you might know someone who can okay real time holder over

excellent