Google LLC is asking for help in developing and testing a new app that it says will be able to help people with speech impairments communicate with others more easily.

The app is called Project Relate, and Google is asking for an initial group of beta testers to help improve its accuracy.

In a presentation at the Inventors @ Google virtual event today, Google Product Manager Julie Cattiau said she believes the company’s speech recognition technology can be customized to understand people with speech impairments better. “Standard speech recognition doesn’t always work well for people with atypical speech because the algorithms have not been trained on samples of their speech,” she said.

So Google’s answer to that problem is to create an app that will be “custom-trained” on people’s unique speech patterns, Cattiau said. The way it works is pretty simple: The user records a set of phrases that help the app get to know how they talk. That’s enough to give the app the ability to carry out basic commands on behalf of each users, and it will slowly but surely become more accurate over time.

Project Relate can therefore be thought of as a transcription tool for people with speech impairments. The app can do three things. The Listen function transcribes what the user is saying, so it can be sent as a text, copied and pasted into other apps, or just shown to someone else so they can read what the person is saying. Repeat just repeats what the user has said, albeit in a clearer computerized voice. Last, Assistant connects with the Google Assistant app to carry out commands such as “turn on the TV” or “take a photo.”

Google has created the app. The next step is to improve its accuracy, and to that end it’s asking for English-speaking users in the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand to sign up and give it a try. Anyone who thinks they might benefit from using Project Relate can sign up as a beta tester here.

Project Relate is just the latest in Google’s push to make its technology more accessible to people with disabilities. Previously, it launched a Live Transcribe app that provides real-time speech-to-text transcription for people who are hard of hearing. It has also created the Lookout app for people who are blind or have poor vision that helps them pinpoint objects in a room, identify food labels and scan documents and paper money.

Photo: Google