Stephen Hawking spoke with aid of device, software

Today’s question:

I’m asking this question in a most respectful tone: Say I visit Vietnam or Nicaragua in the future, and say I buy a delicious food item from a street vendor for $2. Now suppose I tip the vendor $100.

Have I just made the vendor’s week or month or year? I wish I could answer your question

in a most respectful tone, but I can’t. That is a silly question and I don’t know why you asked it.

Recently I watched a program on TV with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he showed a few clips of interviews he had done with Stephen Hawking. What type of technology was used to allow Stephen Hawking’s thoughts to transfer to a voice response?

This is pretty complicated and rather than mess it up trying to paraphrase it, this is lifted from an article by Nina Godlewski in the March 14 issue of Newsweek:

“The program run by Intel that allowed Hawking to select characters and words is called ACAT or assistive context-aware toolkit. An infrared switch that was attached to Hawking’s glasses would detect movement he made with his cheek that would stop the cursor or mouse from moving on the screen. The program allowed Hawking to move his cheek to stop the cursor that automatically scanned a keypad, he wrote on his website.

“After he had the first few characters of a word selected, the computer could usually predict what word he was going for based on studies of his past speeches and books.

“This allowed Hawking to form full sentences without the use of his voice. Once he had the entire sentence written, he could then send it to his speech synthesizer which would read the sentence aloud for him.

“The program also [gave] Hawking access to email, a word processor an even video chatting.”

Have a question for Clay? Reach him at 602-444-8612 or clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com