Funetics

Project Description

Funetics is a fun and innovative design built for many different types of users with communication ailments. Funetics acts as an Alternative and Augmentative Communication method that aims to supplement or replace speech. Funetics is essentially a box 6 slots in the top, where a user can insert a card that has a unique phenome displayed on it. Users will be able to hear correctly pronunicated words and individual phonemes.

Audience

The project is primarily geared towards children but is equally as beneficial to those with English as a second language and suitable for all ages. Not everyone can always afford providing the latest technology and this provides an offline text to speech learning aid without the need of internet or smart device.

How to use

Provided with an abundant of appealing cards, you can easily find the phonetic spelling at the bottom of each card and the normal English alphabetic spelling on the top. As users inserts the phonemes, they can hear each sound as the word is being constructed. Upon finishing the last phoneme, you will hear the completed word normally. Additional transcription of words are easily available as well or can be found through an online transcriptor.

An example of how a user can construct their word. Placement of cards in terms of spacing and order do not matter. Excessive whitespace gets removed and do not need to start in the first slot. Funetics is able to pronounce any word given a correct phonetic spelling.

Example

Since we were working from the back, the phonemes are being read right to left in this video. Hoping to reduce delays between phonemes and due to it able to pronounce any word we need to censor it from being abused with profanity or bad words. We added in specific "Easter Egg" audios incase an unwanted word is attempted.