As mentioned before, Santhosh and I are working for the Instituto Rodrigo Mendes, which has 2 programs: to serve the community through art and education - allowing art instruction for those with disabilities, and to increase the skills of public school teachers to instruct those with disabilities. We are outlining a software solution for both sides. And the ONE product that would make many students more productive, and quite honestly the one product that would make Rodrigo Mendes's life a little easier is speech recognition. Instead of using a mouth pointer to hunt and peck on a keyboard for emails and word processing, those with dexterity challenges and limited use of their limbs can just speak and the computer will recognize the speech and translate it into text. There are a couple of marvelous products out there, the industry standard recommended by all in the disabled community is Dragon........ BUT, Dragon does not have Portuguese support. Philips used to have a really good speech recognition program that used Portuguese and was specific to the medical profession. So that Doctors could dictate their patient's notes into a computer instead of typing them, making them significantly more efficient. Guess what?? Philips sold their voice technology division to Nuance in 2008 - and Nuance is..... wait for it... the makers of Dragon. I contacted Nuance to ask if they had plans for Portuguese support in future releases, and they don't.
(a photo of me and Santhosh with Rodrigo Mendes)
So I have feelers out in all sorts of directions looking for someone, anyone that is doing work in this field. I have my IBM instructor for all things Voice sending emails to the developers of WebSphere Voice Server/Via Voice in both Hursley and Boca Raton. I have my new (and wonderful) SDM Katherine sending emails to previous coworkers at Siemens and Philips to see if they still have a residual product. I took advantage of my conversation at IBM on Wednesday to ask the technology professor from USP (University of Sao Paulo) to dig around with his staff, and I met a fantastic Dr. across from Estacion Ciencia, to have his Occupational Therapy staff contact me with any information. So, if anyone out there has any information - Please, please send it my way!
*** and on a more conversational note, Selda, Carol, Mo and I had a fantastic dinner at Ritz, near our hotel. Wierd but true, it was recommended for us by our advisor as a good place to man-watch, it's a gay man's hangout?? None of us are even slightly interested in beautiful boys, but we like to look. Actually, I am the only woman on the trip that is married. Ambretta and Selda never have been married and are really happy with their independent lives. Mo is recently divorced and Carol divorced awhile back. But while there were some servers that were really cute and a couple of patrons, and how sad is it that the dinner was absolutely fantastic and that's more important to me than the eye candy. Actually, we have some really attractive men working with us, so that works too. Then after dinner we walked down the hill and had a fulfilling experience at Haagen Daz, so God bless the icecream people, and go Girl Power!
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