Google: Project Relate

Empowering millions to be better understood by breaking barriers with voice technology

What? Consumer Insights, Films, Digital, Keynote

My role:
Worked closely with the Google product and marketing team to discover insights about non-standard speech users and their use of speech recognition technology to input into Project Relate for India which was at a beta stage. Took the stories and created films and narratives that were showcased at the Google for India keynote and online.

The idea and insight:
250M people worldwide have non-standard speech. For them, communicating with others and being easily understood can be difficult. And the reality is that while India has a population of over a billion people, there are only about 4000 registered speech-language pathologists, audiologists and scientists.

That’s a big opportunity for speech technology. Unfortunately, standard speech recognition models don’t work very well for people with non standard speech. Each person’s speech patterns are very different, which makes it difficult for algorithms to understand and interpret them.

Following years of research from Google’s Speech and Research teams, Project Relate was created. An app that’s custom trained to unique speech patterns of people with non-standard speech.

Through this project, Google hopes to help non-standard speech users be better understood on a daily basis and make products that rely on speech recognition technology, like Google Assistant, more accessible to everyone.

The app has been piloted with English users in India and will be expanded to Hindi users in 2023.