Idea for a "Reverse" TTS in Discord aka STT
Hello! I am contacting on behalf of the entire Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, although I feel this will also be beneficial to everyone that cannot join voice chat in Discord servers.
I have a major idea suggestion and I understand that it may take some work and updates for it to work.. It is an idea of a "reverse" TTS and we get STT.
So, we have voice channels, and sometimes Deaf and Hard of Hearing people such as myself cannot join in on the fun for meetings or gaming... and we can't rely on others to remember to type in chat for us, so... the idea is this:
Somehow have an option to open a separate text chat/channel that comes with the voice channel, and we can enable the "STT" where Discord itself can automatically post what is being said by each person and each person would already have an ID associated with their account names and their mics. I figure maybe it could work somehow as a reverse TTS since TTS can automatically speak out audio wise.
The text channel for this would work and look like any normal discord text channel.
I hope we can work together on this idea, I think it will be beneficial for everyone not just the Deaf and HoH community! For example, if someone needs to mute for whatever reason, they can still keep up with what is happening in the voice chat.
I would love to be able to keep up with my hearing friends in games when they are in voice chat instead of feeling left out.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
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THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN
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If it could be displayed as part of the overlay in-game it would also be really awesome as well so deaf and hard of hearing gamers can communicate in real-time with other players in co-op games.
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Hell yeah I Support it. I live with severe hearing loss and I am partially deaf
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LET'S DO THIS!! Strong support
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A piece of legislation called CVAA already requires that all text chat services must be accessible to people who are deaf, under threat of very large fines.
The compliance deadline for communication services like Discord was October 2012. A petition is not the right way to approach it, a regulatory framework is already in place... Raise the issue with the FCC and they'll open up a meditation process between you and the company to get it fixed.
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The legislation didn’t actually go into effect for them until Jan 1 2019 and didn’t include services like discord. The legislation was pretty clear about existing services vs new services and applied most extensively to console/pc games, not service platforms like slack/discord that already existed. It isn’t too far fetched that they will eventually be forced to adapt their platform to support it, but it is still helpful to put it on their radar proactively
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@Ian Hamilton
Actually no. The legislation does not require discord to implement their own STT system as both desktop and mobile devices have systems to allow for speech inputs into text fields. I'm actually using Google Keyboards STT feature to write this reply right now.
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@syntaxprime that's very different functionality to the functionality that the OP described. What you're talking about is a means of making text chat accessible to people who have difficulty with text entry.
If you're deaf and go into a discord voice chat you trying to use system level SST does not help you in any way, it would translate your own speech, not other people's.
Even if you managed to persuade everyone else to use it out would be of no use, because there is no way to display text in an audio channel.
Hence the OP discussing having a text channel explicitly associated with the audio channel, through which a deaf person (or, for example, an autistic person who finds the reinforcement of text + audio useful) can choose to have everyone's voice chat -also- displayed as text.
Android a system wide captioning would be the closest thing to a system level solution, but that can only act on the confined audio output, so if you have people speaking at the same it won't be able to tell them apart,and won't be able to indicate which text is associated with which user. Whereas Discord has access to each separate person's individual audio stream.
You're correct that CVAA does not require STT. It does not require any features at all, it has performance objectives along the lines of "must have at least one mode that is accessible to people who are deaf", each applicable to each service, so e.g. both "text chat must have a mode that works for people who are deaf" and "voice chat must have a mode that works for people who are deaf", assessed separately. And more directly, they want people to have as equivalent experience as possible (source - direct conversations with FCC)
Does that all make sense?
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@Ian Hamilton
Yeah that makes sense, I missed the part about it being voice channels. The difficulty is that I don't think there's many STT engines which would be powerful enough to handle this, nor do I believe discord has sufficient compute power to pull this off as of yet. Definitely something that would require a large investment from discord but I agree that it would be a useful feature.
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@syntaxprime it's all happening, Microsoft set a precedent (and set FCC expectations) with the speech to text API that they provided for free as part of the Xbox SDK.
With Google's just-announced Android stuff being a notable exception it is usually done through a cloud service, including the Xbox service. Most of the big tech companies have cloud SST services that they licence out in this way.
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I'd love to be able to interact with a discord channel hands free!
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This will help me and my CoD team or My Siege team communicate so much better
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I'd love to be able to have this function for an intersectional group I run.
It's a bit awkward claiming to be intersectional and knowing when someone HoH joins they can't engage in our main meets which are on a call.
I've been trying to find ways to fix it for ages.
We have made a text channel FOR the voice channel, but it's still hard for people to remember to look at it and it only helps hearing people who are unable to speak, so mute folk, or folk who have no mic, or are worried about waking someone.1 -
its been 2 years and i see discord still doesnt care about people with disabilities
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It would take a great amount of computing power and resources to make this available to everyone. Would you want this feature if it required proof of hearing disability?
But it would be nice to at least have it as a paid option.
By the way, there is a way you can use a google doc's voice recognition feature, perhaps along with virtual cable software or something like that (if using same pc for discord), to capture what is being said. But I found it only works for me if the google doc page is active, so if you switch to discord (if on same pc), it stops transcribing until you go back and start it again.
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