Project DIVA: Making the Google Assistant More Accessible
June 2019 | By Lorenzo Caggioni
A project to identify solutions and devices to let people with disabilities interact with the Google Assistant in a non-verbal way.
Collection:
There is no doubt that the Google Home and the Google Assistant are helping people with disabilities to fulfil tasks and become more and more autonomous in their daily activities.
But... to interact with the Assistant you need to have good speaking skills. This makes the Assistant not accessible to a lot of people with limited or no speaking skills.
The idea is to create devices to let users configure physical objects (buttons, RFID/NFC tags, object detected by an ML model, ...) to trigger commands to the Assistant.
With this solution, people with disabilities will be able to interact with the devices and services using the standard consumer product chain, adapting the “last mile” to the special ability each one of us has. This is making the solution not just accessible, but also inclusive. People won’t be different interacting with the Assistant Ecosystem.