Visual Sound – A Phone Concept for the ones with Hearing Loss

Designed by Pratt Institute student Suhyun Kim, this sexy looking phone has out-sliding pillars that open up a gorgeous touchscreen and is designed keeping in mind the needs of the hearing impaired. The USP of the concept is that it derives outgoing voice from keyed in text, to be sent over to a desired receiver and vice versa.

Most hearing impaired people, specially the ones who lost their hearing ability in early childhood, can barely speak out a few words, as their brain has not learned any words since it stopped hearing. So, the hearing impaired person keys in the text via the gorgeous touchscreen, which gets converted into voice and is sent to the other person on the line. Similarly, the incoming voice first goes through the speech-to-text conversion, the result of which is displayed to the hearing impaired user. This two-way conversion is not only suitable for hearing impaired but also people who cannot speak.

But the only real hindrance in the usage of this phone seems to be the long time taken for text-to-speech and back conversions. Also, I wonder how would be the experience for the person being called? How would you feel if u hear a bot talking to you?

But nonetheless, this concept is definitely an innovative one, designed with a really noble intent. We have seen Nokia working on similar concepts for the blind, hope these companies can collaborate and speed up the research in this direction.

(Yanko Design via Recombu)

Visual Sound – A Phone Concept for the ones with Hearing Loss