Tessa, a system to aid communication with deaf people

Abstract

TESSA is an experimental system that aims to aid transactions between a deaf person and a clerk in a Post Office by translating the clerk's speech to sign language. A speech recogniser recognises speech from the clerk and the system then synthesizes the appropriate sequence of signs in British Sign language (BSL) using a specially-developed avatar. By using a phrase lookup approach to language translation, which is appropriate for the highly constrained discourse in a Post Office, we were able to build a working system that we could evaluate. We summarise the results of this evaluation (undertaken by deaf users and Post office clerks), and discuss how the findings from the evaluation are being used in the development of an improved system.