The vOICe for Android 0.48

The vOICe for Android 0.48 is a useful tool which is designed to translate live views into sounds. Using this application will bring you much surprise and convenience.

The vOICe for Android application translates live views from an Android camera phone into sounds that you hear via the phones speaker or headset, thus targeting sensory substitution applications for the totally blind, and even synthetic vision. The vOICe uses pitch for height and loudness for brightness in a left to right scan of any view. Includes talking color identifier and talking compass.

Major Features:

1. What color is it?
   
   • The "*" (star, asterisk) or "q" key and the alternative "Alt-Q" key combination toggle the talking color identifier on and off. This mobile color recognizer for blind and color-blind people speaks the color of whatever shows at the center of the camera view. Note that results of color recognition depend on ambient light and camera quality. Recognized colors include (dark, normal, and light) red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, orange and magenta, as well as combination colors such as red-orange. Black, grey and white are also identified, bringing the total number of identified colors and shades to 47.
   • Further options exist for color filters, even including a filter for detecting exposed skin, e.g., for face detection, for detecting people or to help find empty seats. Color filters are toggled by pressing the first letter of the supported color name, such as "g" for green.Part of the screen's background will track the selected color filter or the identified color. The color filters can also be used by blind and color-blind people to pick wires of a user-selected color, e.g., to distinguish red or yellow wires in electronics by pressing "r" or "y" for the red and yellow color filters. If it is not known in advance which colors are present in the view, key "a" can be applied to analyze the view by cycling over the supported colors. Beware though that the choice of color names can be culturally biased: cyan is a color in between green and blue, while magenta is basically the same as the color purple. Also, light-magenta and light-red make for the color pink or very similar colors, while dark-orange appears as a shade of brown. Dark yellow-green makes for olive-green.
2. Talking compass
   
   • The vOICe for Android contains a talking compass that speaks the current heading. By default it only speaks heading changes, but options for continuous heading feedback and for disabling the talking compass are available via the Options menu. The eight supported spoken compass directions are north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west and northwest. The screen's see-through overlay with a virtual 3D foreground visually tracks detected changes in direction. Note that the T-Mobile G1 compass is auto-calibrating: if it appears to give wrong results, move the phone slowly around in all directions (e.g., figure eights) to help the compass recalibrate. Beware: the compass readings may at present still be very unreliable or inaccurate due to bugs in the G1 sensor firmware. A future firmware upgrade (cupcake) should fix that.
3. Where am I?
   
   • The vOICe for Android contains a talking locator that speaks street names and intersections in your immediate vicinity as determined from GPS satellites or local cell towers, for increased location awareness. In order to use this location-based service (LBS), the  TTS-for-Android library APK file must first have been installed. Real-time navigation and route guidance is currently not supported by The vOICe for Android, because use of  Google Maps data for this purpose is not allowed without prior authorization
   • In the longer term, to support GPS navigation and route guidance, a combination of  OpenStreetMap and  Loadstone GPS might become an acceptable alternative to using Google Maps in case current licensing restrictions are not resolved. You may also want to check out  AndNav, the Android Navigation System developed by Nicolas Gramlich.
4. Stereo and 3D audio
   
   • The vOICe for Android supports stereo panning and 3D audio spatialization on suitable stereo-enabled Android phones with a stereo headset. The stereo panning makes perception of lateral position in image scans more intuitive, while binaural cues offered by 3D audio may further help with object segregation in complex scenes. Options for Mono (default), Stereo and 3D audio are available in the Channels dialog in the Options menu. Phones lacking stereo capabilities may give distorted mono sound when set to the Stereo or 3D audio mode. The Stereo and 3D audio mode also add to the CPU load.
   • The vOICe's stereo and 3D audio is optimized for application in immersive synthetic vision rather than for psychoacoustic positional audio realism, and it is designed for use with a discrete stereo headset rather than a surround sound speaker set.
5. Support for third-party OCR and blind photography
   
   • Pressing the "p" key saves a high resolution camera snapshot in JPEG format either to the /sdcard/vOICe/ folder (on SD card, default) or to the /data/data/vOICe.vOICe/files/ internal flash memory folder of your Android phone, with a timestamp in the filename, e.g., "vOICe_1155742184123.jpg". Such snapshots can be used as input for third-party OCR engines to recognize text in images. OCR from camera snapshots may take place through communication with remote servers, as in the  WeOCR project of Hideaki Goto for Web-enabled (online) OCR.
   • Some blind people like to take pictures to document situations much like other people do, or they apply it as an art form. As indicated above, The vOICe for Android will save a high resolution camera snapshot of the current view when pressing the "p" key. The visual sounds of The vOICe can thus be used as a kind of auditory viewfinder to let blind photographers frame their subsequent high resolution photographs.
     

Enhancements:

• Support added for the Text-To-Speech Library (TTS Service) of Charles Chen.
• Improved robustness against out-of-memory errors. 
  

WareSeeker Editor