@talk - cellular phone web browser for the elderly people

This paper describes mobile web speech software for cellular phones called @talk. The @talk system adopts a server-client model that has increased computing power and a Text-To-Speak (TTS) engine that adds speech functions. The TTS engine sits on the server side, while displaying texts and speaking functions are processed on the cellular phone handset. The @talk system works like a visual web browser with a speech option. If content on the handset screen is hard to view, users can scroll to a highlighted position and press a speech button. Then, the user can hear the content spoken aloud by an electronically-generated voice. The developed prototype successfully generated spoken versions of text content found on the display interface of the phone.