The iPhone maker previews a handful of new features designed for cognitive, vision, hearing and mobility accessibility.
Apple on Tuesday previewed a handful of new features for iPhone, iPad and Mac designed to boost cognitive, vision, hearing and mobility accessibility, ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The features are slated to roll out later this year.
One feature, called Live Speech, is geared toward users who are nonspeaking or who have diverse speech patterns or disabilities. Live Speech lets someone type what they want to say and then have it spoken aloud. The feature can be used for in-person conversations as well as over the phone and on FaceTime. It works on iPhone, iPad and Mac and uses any built-in device voices like Siri. You could say, «Nice to meet you, I’m …» and introduce yourself, for example, and can also save favorite phrases like, «Can I please get a black coffee?»
Taking that feature a step further is Personal Voice, which lets users at risk of speech loss create a voice that sounds like them and then have it speak aloud their typed-out phrases. Personal Voice uses on-device machine learning. To train the feature, a person spends about 15 minutes speaking a series of text prompts aloud on iPhone or iPad.
