Technological University Dublin supported by Disability Federation Ireland organized a lunch event for disable people to communicate with the help of their application called as Open CHAT today at the University at 10:07 am. The application is a collaboration of two companies, Sight and Sound Technology based on UK and Freedom Tech based on USA. There were guest speakers including Minister of State, Further Education addressing the success of their lunch and promising a great future for the application to introduced to the public, helping disable students and alike.
The event opened with a warm welcome by Catherine Lynch, the Head of SLWC and Disability Support and introduced the audience about Open CHAT. The application helps the blind and disable people to easily communicate with an human-sounding voices through the use of this application. The user-friendly program turns printed text into a electronic voice memo into the computer screen. The program uses quality speech and the advance optical character recognition tech. James Bronson who is disable tells the audience that he uses a lot of the program functions carries his life and even helped him to graduate from university. However, the TU Dublin Supporting officers when asked about the implication of the program tells the audience that he gets frustrated sometimes when it gets jammed, overall, he uses application to help him in his memory issues.
The event also showcases an Open Letter to the government and other officials to hear about the appeal for the application. The announcer Joan O’ Donnell who is one of the people from Freedom Tech tells the audience that UN has acknowledges the technology and wrote commitments to use the technology for the benefit of the public. The commitment was in the form of Declaration called as Bologna Declaration which is the act where it helps the disability people all around the world. With that, there were some promising words from Mary Mitchell O’ Connor, the Minister of State, Further Education says with the total budget of £ 1.9 billion, there will be investment on the application as it is most important for the school going children who are unable to speak nor see. As, she has a great concern for their future.
The inventors of Open CHAT Joan O’ Donnell from Freedom Tech and Gleen Tookey from Sight and Sound address their collaboration for this application as learning experience and was happy to work together. They talked about the application will help many disable people. It will be accessible to all the students on the university. Among the speakers, Professor Donal Fitzpatrick of DCU also shared the experience with the audience by tell them that with the help of the application which automatically function helps him to travel as he is blind.
Catherine Bates, MC for the event also talked about other products was in display among them was the robot called Mylo which is a monitoring companion robot, paired with the a health sensor watch, designed to help people live independently.
Sukrity Sharma 