Project Understood

About the Work With 8 billion voice assistants in use by 2023, the future is voice-first, but that future doesn’t include people with Down syndrome because they have atypical speech. Google’s voice assistant misunderstands 1 in 3 words they speak. For people with Down syndrome, voice technology offers more than everyday convenience – it means a profound difference in their daily quality of life as voice disabilities often comes with physical disabilities. Making access to voice technology an issue of life-changing independence. Google usually teaches us, but instead we empowered people with Down syndrome to teach Google. Introducing Project Understood, a campaign that recruited the Down syndrome community to donate their voices to train Google’s speech recognition model to understand them. The more data collected the smarter the model gets – potentially improving speech recognition technology and making the world more accessible for the 78 million people with all forms of atypical speech. Results: • 30+ countries and 735 Down syndrome organizations participated • 17,000 website visits • Over 600 people with Down syndrome added a million phrases to Google’s speech recognition algorithm • 775 million earned media impressions • Findings presented at the UN • Entering beta testing