Nicholas Smit and Nicole Vergos are on a mission to help people living with disabilities overcome them, just as they have.



There aren’t enough hours in the day for Nicholas Smit and Nicole Vergos. For Smit, a typical day includes rounds of teaching, tutoring and motivational speaking. For Vergos, whose day begins at 5AM, it’s pretty much the same, battling traffic to get to work and spending her day addressing umpteen client requests, attending meetings and going over research reports. Even in the evenings, and over the weekend, Smit and Vergos, who are friends and business partners, don’t stop, as they meet to work on their brainchild, Smergos.



They are both driven entrepreneurs with boundless dreams that reach across Africa.



And they achieve all of the above, without letting their own disabilities define or limit them.



Vergos was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that causes bones to be brittle and this has meant being in a wheelchair all her life. Smit, as the result of a car accident, has lived with cerebral palsy and left hemiplegia for all of his adult life.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“We fell into the trap that most entrepreneurs fall into, looking for perfection.&#8221;</blockquote>



But together, they are a formidable team on a mission to empower other people living with disabilities, helping them live their lives to the fullest.



Smergos itself had humble beginnings at home in South Africa.



Smit, in a frantic search for a birthday gift for Vergos, realized that locally, there were not enough viable products that catered to the day-to-day needs of someone in a wheelchair or moving around with the help of crutches. Products available abroad were expensive and took incredibly long to arrive. 



Armed with this epiphany, Smit chatted to Vergos and Smergos was born. Conceptualized in 2012, the company went public in 2015.



Says Vergos: “We fell into the trap that most entrepreneurs fall into, looking for perfection.” The co-founders spent those early years before going public perfecting the design of their products and sourcing a local manufacturer who could turn their vision into a reality.



Once going public, the response was overwhelming and the company has served the disabled community since.



Winning accolades for their work, the company has also gone from strength to strength. In 2017, Smergos was awarded a grant from ygap, which promotes the acceleration of social impact companies. This grant was used to prototype and test their products which increased the range available to their clientele. And these are bags that fit neatly on any wheelchair, giving the user a safe and easily accessible way to carry their belongings.



Smergos also won a SAB Innovation Award within the disability division and were awarded another grant and mentorship to grow their brand and public reach. Through dedication and determination, Smit and Vergos are continuously striving to improve Smergos and have also been a part of a number of programs focused on mentoring small to medium enterprises.



“Our goal is to become the best we can be so our customers can be the best that they can be,” says Vergos.



It is this constant hunger for growth that has led to the inception of three different product ranges to cater to the needs to their often-marginalized target audience. &nbsp;



“We’re still learning and making sure what we have covers the needs of our market,” adds Smit.



While they are still working on their goal of reaching the rest of Africa, Smergos is paving the way as pioneers within the inclusivity market.



– By Simone Sribrath

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How These Two Entrepreneurs Are Redefining Ability

Want to schedule an appointment? Just ask your phone. Need to turn on your bedroom lights? Google Home has you covered.



Now a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cbinsights.com/research/facebook-amazon-microsoft-google-apple-voice/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$49 billion market</a>, voice-activated systems have gained popularity among consumers, thanks to their ability to automate and streamline mundane tasks. But for people with impaired speech, &nbsp;technologies that rely on voice commands have proved to be far from perfect.



That’s the impetus for Google’s newly formed Project Euphonia, part of the company’s AI for Social Good program. The project team is exploring ways to improve speech recognition for people who are deaf or have neurological conditions such as ALS, stroke, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or traumatic brain injury.



Google has partnered with nonprofit organizations&nbsp;<a href="http://als.net/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ALS Therapy Development Institute</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.alsri.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ALS Residence Initiative (ALSRI)</a>&nbsp;to collect recorded voice samples from people who have the neurodegenerative disease, one that often leads to severe speech and mobility difficulties.



For those with neurological conditions, voice-activated systems can play a key role in completing everyday tasks and conversing with loved ones, caregivers or colleagues. “You can turn on your lights, your music or communicate with someone. But this only works if the technology can actually recognize your voice and transcribe it,” says Julie Cattiau, a product manager at Google AI.



The company’s speech recognition technology utilizes machine learning algorithms that require extensive data training. “We have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of sentences that people have read—and we use them as examples for the algorithms to learn how to recognize each,” says Cattiau. “But it’s not enough for people with disabilities.”



With Project Euphonia, the team will instead use voice samples from people who have impaired speech in the hope that the underlying system will be trained to understand inarticulate commands.



While the goal is to create technology that is more accessible for people with speech impediments, the end result is still unclear.



“It’s possible that we will have models that work for multiple people with ALS and other medical conditions,” says Cattiau. “It’s also possible that people, even just within ALS, sound too different to have such a machine learning model in place. And in that case, we may need to have a level of personalization so that each person has their own model.”



Google’s speech recognition technology can comprehend virtually any voice command for people&nbsp;without&nbsp;speech impairments, due to the large data set that has been available for training. But some uncertainty exists about how broadly speech technology will be able to understand and act on directives from those who have difficulty speaking. The Project Euphonia team has only a limited number &nbsp;of voice samples from people with speech impediments, which allows it to focus only on specific-use words and phrases such as “read me a book” or “turn off the lights.”



Though Cattiau’s team has collected tens of thousands of recorded phrases, she says it needs hundreds of thousands more. That’s partly why Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled this project at the company’s annual developer conference in May.



“We are working hard to provide these voice-recognition models to the Google Assistant in the future,” he said, calling on people with slurred and impaired speech to&nbsp;<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeu8eBOUwzs7PdH25v4lTXjzOVO8rfmfNIoUovLForMmYRipA/viewform" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">submit their voice samples</a>.



“Impaired speech is a very difficult data set to put together. It’s not as simple as asking people to record phrases, and there’s no data set just lying around,” Cattiau says. “We have to first put it together, and that’s a lot of work.”



Perhaps the most groundbreaking of Project Euphonia’s initiatives is its work on new interactive AI systems for people who are completely nonverbal. Also in its early stages, these systems are being trained to detect gestures, vocalizations and facial expressions, which can then trigger certain actions like sending or reading a text message.



“We want to cover the full spectrum of people—and not only those who can still speak,” says Cattiau. Although Project Euphonia is still in its infancy, it could eventually have a great impact on those with disabilities, giving them the freedom and flexibility to live independently.Follow me on&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/ruthumohnews" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter</a>.



-Ruth Umoh; Forbes Staff

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How Google Is Using AI To Make Voice Recognition Work For People With Disabilities

South Africa’s Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. The Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990. The United Kingdom followed five years later with the Disability Discrimination Act. Yet where are all the great leaders championing access for people with hearing loss?
Nelson Mandela wore hearing aids but he is only known for overcoming apartheid in South Africa. Malala Yousafzai wears a cochlear implant, but she never mentions it when she speaks about educating girls. Academy Award Winner and actress Jodie Foster stood up at the Oscars to declare she was a lesbian but never mentioned she wears a hearing aid despite its prominence in a Daily Mail photograph.
There are 360 million people worldwide with some form of hearing loss. How can an issue be so pervasive but with no recognizable role models or leaders? There are great advocates within the insular hearing loss community but no person who captivates the world.
Why are people willing to discuss their race, religion, gender, age and sexual orientation but unwilling to discuss their hearing loss? Is hearing loss so stigmatized that we have created what Dr Julie Gurner, a leadership consultant, calls a “culture of shame”? She explains: “Prominent figures hide their hearing loss so perhaps other people feel maybe they should hide theirs as well.” The press ridiculed Prince Philip when he was first seen wearing hearing aids.
The media’s handling of hearing loss and other disabilities is part of the problem. Their coverage is typically focused on inspirational stories. The person appears as a “Super Crip”. Just think of all the YouTube videos featuring children hearing their parents’ voice for the first time as their cochlear implant is activated. The message communicated is: look how this amazing “crippled” person overcame this horrible obstacle, and so now you too can conquer whatever is preventing you from achieving success. We might as well have the person wear a cape like a superhero.
The media also likes sensational photographs of people with disabilities. The most notable being when American activists crawled up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to show it was the only way to enter a building that lacked ramps. The public seems to respond only to dramatic activism or a “moment” rather than common sense.
We shouldn’t need a “moment” to engender the change that is so desperately needed globally. Hearing loss shuts people out invisibly. Their needs are just as pressing and should be addressed globally.
Part of the problem is a lack of understanding that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to communication access. The following three-prong approach should be offered whenever there is live voice or recorded audio: assistive listening systems such as an induction loop, captioning, and qualified interpreters.
For people with hearing loss, communication access is their “ramp”. South Africa’s Apartheid Museum and Robben Island do not have effective access for people with hearing loss despite being monuments to eradicating discrimination. The museums claim tight finances prevent them from providing access. But that is the same unacceptable excuse used during apartheid by white people for why they couldn’t provide books to black children. Such excuses weren’t acceptable then and aren’t now.
People with hearing loss cannot become leaders when they aren’t included in society. According to Dean Williams, a faculty member of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and author of Leadership for a Fractured World, “A person needs to expand their personal boundaries in order to lead.” Museums provide valuable opportunities for enlightenment and critical thinking that foster such expansion.
The Apartheid Museum and Robben Island museums need to provide effective access for people who are deaf or hard of hearing so they too can benefit from the enrichment that is being offered. We need to inspire the next great leaders and role models of our world.
The writer is based in New York and is CEO of Hearing Access &amp; Innovations, which works to improve accessibility for people with hearing loss.

Tag: Disability

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How Google Is Using AI To Make Voice Recognition Work For People With Disabilities

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