withVR Uses the Power of VR to Prep People with Speech Disorders for Real-life Speaking Situations
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Editor’s note: Meet Gareth Walkom, an entrepreneur dedicated to helping others with speech disorders.
Turning life experience into innovation
Did you know that 3% of Americans have a speech disorder, while 1% of the world’s population have a stutter? Just getting what they need in everyday interactions can be stressful, which intensifies when the stakes are raised during job interviews, presentations, public speaking, and other activities. As a result, some people with speech disorders may avoid conversations and relationships, and risk being denied jobs because of a difference in how they speak.
As a person who stutters, I know firsthand the ableism that people with a speech disorder can encounter in wanting to use their voice in a judgemental world: the frustration of sometimes not being able to say exactly what you want to say and therefore speaking less in speaking situations. And the educational and career opportunities are lost when doors remain closed to us, especially when employers advertise their jobs as requiring someone who speaks the language ‘fluently’.
While researchers still don’t definitively know what causes stuttering, emerging technologies are giving us new and promising pathways for improving the quality of life of people with speech disorders.
That’s why after years of researching and testing potential therapeutic uses of virtual reality, and with the support of the Google for Startups Cloud Program, I founded withVR on International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22) in 2020. The mission of withVR is to prepare people with speech disorders for real-life speaking situations by utilizing the power of virtual reality.
Working through it
One of the difficulties in adapting to any disability is the opportunity to work through it in a safe and nonjudgmental environment. withVR provides a virtual space for individuals, in collaboration with their speech therapists, to practice real-world speaking scenarios in safe, controlled environments.
Imagine being able to raise your hand in class and give your opinion without hesitation, ordering the meal you want rather than something that’s easier to say, or sit across the table from an avatar of an employer and explain why you are the right person for your dream job. Then further customize the speaking situation and its surroundings to challenge yourself and be ready for anything. That’s what withVR offers individuals and their speech therapists.
Making VR come to life
To bring the withVR vision to life, we are developing applications using the Unity game engine on Google Cloud with integrated Firebase services including authentication, web hosting, storage, and database. It’s a powerful combination that’s enabled us to build industrial-strength applications that we’ve rapidly deployed on a global basis. Today we are already collaborating with 80+ labs, clinics, and hospitals in more than 20 different countries worldwide.
These organizations help us to test and refine a virtual reality application to support people in achieving their speech goals and build comfort through immersive VR experiences using easily available viewers like Google Cardboard.
The application works in conjunction with a web app through which speech therapists configure customized VR scenarios for their patients to use. As no real-life speaking situation is ever exactly the same, customization of VR scenarios is vital. They can construct different scenes, create and script avatars, and through the Google Text-to-Speech API can even choose from hundreds of different voices in a variety of languages. This gives them the flexibility to create many unique speaking situations for their clients no matter where they are in the world.
Progress from the practice sessions is presented through a dashboard that provides therapists with a tool to monitor their clients’ progress and provide feedback and encouragement.
No shortage of support
My founder’s journey has been supported by many passionate people. The Google for Startups Cloud Program has been instrumental in helping us come so far in the first year, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. There are many capabilities in Firebase and Google Cloud that we have yet to explore, and through the startup program I now have a Google Mentor who can help guide that exploration.
We also joined the 2Gether-International (2GI) Tech Cohort, which is supported by Google for Startups and is built for and run by entrepreneurs with disabilities. At the end of the 10-week cohort, we finished with a pitch competition, where I was one of six selected founders to pitch in just three minutes. I was very fortunate to win the Best Overall Pitch Award, gaining 10,000 USD in seed funding. This award not only highlights the potential of withVR, but also showcases that anyone can pitch their idea in a short amount of time no matter their difference.
Working with 2GI also gave me the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other founders who have disabilities. It’s a safe space where I don’t have to explain my everyday challenges and can focus on the all-important task of advancing the vision of withVR, while seeing how others use technology in their domain.
Building on a strong foundation
I’m amazed to look back and see what we’ve accomplished in just one year and humbled by the thousands of lives we’ve touched. Every day we receive valuable real-life feedback from people in the field—both clinicians and those with speech differences who benefit from VR therapy. That knowledge tells us that we are heading in the right direction and opening our eyes to new possibilities for where to take withVR. And inspiring us to keep moving ahead.
If you’d like to participate in testing or if you are speech therapist or researcher, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to show you how you can contribute to a world where anyone with a speech disorder can truly use their voice in any situation. If you’d like to take part, contact us at hello@withvr.app.
If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.
Transforming Media Industry: Three Strategies for Media Leaders to Leverage Generative AI
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The digital era turned the traditional formula for media and entertainment success on its head, ushering in new technologies that have changed how content is produced, distributed, experienced, and monetized. Audiences have more choice, flexibility, and power over what they consume, and today’s media companies have to embrace ongoing transformation or risk falling behind – or becoming irrelevant.
A new wave of transformation is arriving with generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can interact with users in natural language and create novel data, ranging from story outlines, reports, and other text outputs to multimodal content like images, videos, and audio. Media and entertainment are inherently about content creation and creativity—so what does this new technology mean for the industry?
At Google Cloud, we see tremendous opportunity for creative industries, from more efficient creation methods to improved user experiences. Let’s explore.
AI for media with Google Cloud
Google Cloud has a long history with large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI technologies—from their influence over the years on products like Document AI, to recent announcements like Generative AI support in Vertex AI, which lets businesses access and tune generative AI foundation models, and Generative AI App Builder, which lets developers build chatbots and other generative apps in minutes.
We’ve helped our global media and entertainment customers with AI for personalization, search and recommendations, predictive analytics, and much more — and with generative AI now on the rise, we have some ideas to help media leaders, technologists, and creators think about and prepare to utilize powerful AI in their work.
Three lenses on innovation in media
The media and entertainment industry is increasingly diverse and complex, with companies spanning over-the-top (OTT) subscription streaming services, 24-hour linear channels, live broadcasts of sporting events, digital journalism, traditional publishing, short-form user-generated social video, and more. More and more, the boundaries between these segments of the media industry are blurring — but common to them all is the focus on providing compelling content in an engaging audience experience that can be directly or indirectly monetized.
With this in mind, we suggest media and entertainment companies look at the application of innovative technologies like generative AI through the following three lenses:
- Improving content creation, production, and management
- Enhancing and personalizing audience experiences
- Improving monetization
Improving content creation, production, and management
Generative AI democratizes many aspects of content creation, opening new ways to create written material, illustrations, sound effects, special effects, and more. Its recent maturation has been so rapid, some in the media industry have expressed concern that generative AI implies the end of creative professions. We think the opposite is more likely: just as photography, audio recordings, and computer generated images have enabled new modes of creativity, rather than making old ones obsolete, generative AI has the potential to both enable new forms of expression and enhance familiar ones.
For example, journalists could use generative AI to speed up research by helping them synthesize and analyze large volumes of information, or to help them create initial drafts or summaries of editorial content. Film and television producers could leverage the technology to accelerate the post-production editing process, with new AI-enabled interfaces for rapidly adjusting or enhancing scene details such as lighting and color. Broadcasters could use generative AI to make vast libraries of video footage searchable and accessible for use in telling more compelling stories. The potential use cases go on and on.
Far from undermining incredible creative professions, generative AI is poised to free writers, artists, editors, and many others from the tedious and mundane aspects of their work, empowering them to focus more of their time on creativity.
Enhancing and personalizing audience experiences
Every media organization in the world today faces the reality that for most consumers, switching costs are extremely low. This puts incredible pressure on these companies to invest in delivering low-friction and compelling audience experiences that help mitigate subscribers from churning and viewers from abandoning content experiences for competitive platforms.
Generative AI can help media companies engage and retain viewers, such as by enabling more powerful search and recommendations on their digital content platforms. With its increasingly multimodal capabilities extending from natural language to both audio and video content, generative AI is well-positioned to power more personalized audience experiences.
Consumers often complain about “the paradox of choice” or their inability to find something interesting to watch on streaming platforms that have incredibly vast libraries of content available on demand. Imagine a not-too-distant future wherein a consumer can simply ask the content platform they’re using to help them find a specific show to watch based on mood, specific types of scenes, combinations of actors, award nominations, or practically anything they can think to ask. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg — imagine generative AI’s potential to curate, assemble, and even create personalized content for a viewer to consume!
Improving monetization
As consumers’ content consumption further expands from traditional theatrical and linear television programming to include digital offerings across an array of platforms, devices, and content types, media companies face the challenge of maintaining and improving monetization. The conventional economics and approaches to advertising and subscription models are proving, in many cases, not to deliver sufficient ROI.
Generative AI has the potential to help media companies improve their monetization of audience experiences. As mentioned previously, enhanced personalization can play a role in mitigating churn, which in turn can help sustain and grow subscription and advertising revenues. Going beyond this, generative AI can be leveraged to drive even greater advertising revenues via more targeted, contextual, and personalized advertisements. Imagine both display and video advertisements that are generated on the fly to personalize product specifics, messaging, style, colors, and innumerable other characteristics to drive greater engagement and higher click-through rates (CTR), and thus higher advertising CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).
Coming up next
Generative AI presents a significant opportunity for media companies to fundamentally transform content creation, engagement, and monetization. Compelling services are already on the market — but there is far more to come.
Google Cloud continues to build on its deep experience and expertise with AI, and we are committed to working with the industry to develop compelling, accessible, trusted, and responsible AI solutions that will drive meaningful business outcomes. We are excited to create the future together with our global media customers and partners across the ecosystem. To learn more about this disruptive topic, read “Debunking five generative AI misconceptions” from Google Cloud vice president of AI & Business Solutions Phil Moyer, or explore our Trusted Tester Program for generative AI.
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Choosing ROI criteria that drive smart decisions about digital investments is necessary to win in the app economy. But according to an Apigee Institute survey of IT and Marketing executives, there is a wide gap between what corporate leaders believe are the best ROI metrics and what are actually used in most enterprises today. Those who move first to bridge the gap will be able to move further and faster towards digital transformation and market leadership.
This special report drills down on patterns and practices for digital ROI that drive more confident decision making and stronger results based on empirical analysis of 200 large companies. Read the report to understand how you can drive decisions about digital investments to the next level of actionability and strengthen digital capabilities by building stronger organizational alignment. The report explores how top performing digital businesses evaluate and make decisions about digital investments using data analytics, by deploying apps, and operating APIs.
Can Your Company Use Video AI? You’d Be Surprised at the Answer
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Video AI is a powerful way to enable content discovery and engaging video experiences.
Here, try it out right now!
Google Cloud’s easy-to-access video AI solutions can accomplish a bunch of things. Here are a few:
Precise video analysis: Video Intelligence API automatically recognizes more than 20,000 objects, places, and actions in stored and streaming video. It also distinguishes scene changes and extracts rich metadata at the video, shot, or frame level. Use in combination with AutoML Video Intelligence to create your own custom entity labels to categorize content. Imagine being able to categorise hundreds of videos of customer interactions quickly to improve service training!
Recommended content: Build a content recommendation engine with labels generated by Video Intelligence API and a user’s viewing history and preferences. This will simplify content discovery for your users and guide them to the most relevant content that they want.
Simplify media management: Find value in vast archives by making media easily searchable and discoverable. Easily search your video catalog the same way you search text documents. Extract metadata that can be used to index, organize, and search your video content, as well as control and filter content for what’s most relevant.Imagine being able to locate insight in hundreds of enterprise videos to improve productivity and customer experience!
Easily create intelligent video apps: Gain insights from video in near real time using the Video Intelligence Streaming Video APIs, and trigger events based on objects detected. Build engaging customer experiences with highlight reels, recommendations, interactive videos, and more. Marketers, imagine being able to trigger a customer workflow, in real time, based on a live customer interactions.
Automate expensive workflows: Reduce time and costs associated with transcribing videos and generating closed captions, as well as flagging and filtering inappropriate content.
Content moderation: Identify when inappropriate content is being shown in a given video. You can instantly conduct content moderation across petabytes of data and more quickly and efficiently filter your content or user-generated content.
What can your organisation do with video AI?
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Aspiration is easy, but execution is hard. Few concepts illustrate this as well as digital transformations.
Most businesses today are at some phase of their digital transformation journey. While some are evaluating strategies and solutions, many companies have already embarked on full-scale project implementations. However, one thing is clear. While most business and IT leaders aspire to revamp their businesses, executing a well-defined digital transformation strategy is extremely complicated. The hurdles are both cultural and technological.
This e-Book breaks down the process of creating a digital transformation strategy into ten core dimensions: platform, APIs, outside-in, ecosystem, leadership, funding, metrics, software development lifecycle, talent, and self-service. Read on to understand how companies like Walgreens, Ticketmaster, Magazine Luiza, AccuWeather, and Pitney Bowes, are successfully charting their digital transformation journey with the help of Apigee Compass and evolving their businesses.
Google is the Top Provider for Continuous Integration Tools, According to Forrester
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Google’s continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform, Cloud Build, emerges as a Leader for Continuous Integration.
“Google Cloud Build comes out swinging, going toe to toe with other cloud giants. Google Cloud Build is relatively new when compared to the other public cloud CI offerings, they had a lot to prove, and they did so.”
— Forrester Wave: Continuous Integration Tools
Forrester Wave on Continuous Integration identifies most significant continuous integration (CI) tool providers and shows how each vendor measures up on 27 criteria. Download the full report to see what makes Cloud Build a Leader in Continuous Integration.
In the report, you will learn:
- Where the market stands and where it’s going
- Why Google has the strongest score for security and compliance within CI/CD
- How Cloud Build ranks amongst the other vendors on performance and scalability
- How Cloud Build’s enterprise strategy and vision are superior to other vendors
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