Ink To Speech
If you have a speech disability and do a lot of communication with pen and paper today, at some point the Tablet PC may provide another way to communicate. Technology exists today to perform ink handwriting recognition, and the recognized text can be read by a text to speech program.
The Tablet PC has technology to look at the digital ink written with the pen, and for many people it can convert that ink into the appropriate text. By linking this technology to the text to speech technology inside Windows XP, it is possible for a program to make it easy to write ink to be used for conversations.
Today there are no commercial Ink To Speech programs available for the Tablet PC, but hopefully in time some will be available from Assistive Technology companies. A simple program, InkTalk, is available from this site and shows how this technology can be useful in some situations for quick conversations.
These pictures show how easy InkTalk is to use; just write want you want to say, let the Tablet PC convert the ink to text, and then click "Speak." To learn more about how to use InkTalk, click here.
