The Xiaomi voice matching donation project was affirmed in the service design category of "iF DESIGN AWARD 2023" . The award is held annually by iF International Design Forum GmbH (iF Design), headquartered in Hannover, Germany's oldest independent design agency.
After a professional review by the iF independent jury composed of international experts, the Xiaomi voice matching donation project was favored by 133 judges because of its innovative personalized voice customization service process for speech-impaired people. The selection process of the iF DESIGN AWARD is tight and highly competitive: this year, nearly 11,000 entries from 56 countries and regions around the world participated in the competition .
Figure 1 iF DESIGN AWARD 2023 award certificate
Since 1954, the iF DESIGN AWARD has been a hallmark of quality for design excellence. The iF Design brand is known worldwide for its outstanding design services. The iF Design Award has also become one of the most important design awards in the world. It recognizes achievements in various design categories every year: including product design, packaging design, communication design, service design, Architecture and interior architectural design, professional concepts, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI), etc.
Among them, the service design category focuses on evaluating process design, emphasizing attention to user experience, including whether the designed experience process is understandable, smooth, people-oriented and sustainable. In recent years, service design has gradually been valued by various companies. This project is also the affirmation that Xiaomi has won the service design award for the second time so far .
The "Xiaomi Voice Matching Donation Project" is a technology and service innovation that focuses on the limitations of personalized voice services in the market. Prior to this, speech synthesis technology services on the market needed to collect the speaker's own corpus, and then use AI model training to customize a personalized voice model. However, people with speech disabilities were excluded from previous personalized voice customization services because they could not accurately speak complete words and sentences.
Figure 2 Service process of personalized speech synthesis technology in the market
In the service process of the "Voice Matching Donation Project", Xiaomi has established a voice donation library by collecting very short but sufficient voice samples from the crowd. Then use the voiceprint adaptation algorithm to match the speech-impaired person who cannot speak with a donor with the closest voice condition, and let the donor replace the speech-impaired person to record the corpus.
At the same time, Xiaomi also co-created with speech-impaired users, combined with its own voice presets, adjusted the parameters of the donor's corpus, and made a certain difference between the voiceprint and the donor to ensure the privacy of the donor. Then use the super anthropomorphic technology to synthesize an exclusive timbre that is similar to the timbre that speech-impaired users should have, unique and very close to the real voice .
Figure 3 Personalized voice customization process for speech-impaired persons in this project
Technically, this project breaks through the limitations of personalized voice customization, overcomes the difficulty that speech-impaired people cannot provide their own corpus, and fills the gap in voice customization and synthesis services for special groups.
At present, this technical path has been verified and can be reused on any aphasic person with insufficient language materials, including hearing impairment, autism, Down syndrome and other diseases, sudden stroke (stroke) or other reasons People with impaired vocal function. It is a new breakthrough in technology application and service process .
Let us take 2 minutes to review the Xiaomi voice matching donation project!
Video: Introduction to Voice Matching Donation Project
Xiaomi has been paying attention to the barrier-free design of products for a long time, and is committed to building a people-oriented support system for people with disabilities, and insists on allowing people with disabilities in need to participate in the design process to achieve multi-party co- creation .
Before being affirmed by "iF DESIGN AWARD 2023", Xiaomi's sound matching donation has been selected into the "2022 CCF Technology Public Welfare Case Collection", "Excellent Cases of Beijing Information and Communication Industry Aging and Barrier-free Services", and won the 2022 China Benefit Company "Technology Innovation Outstanding Enterprise" and other honors.
This award is a reflection of Xiaomi's high recognition from the design community in the field of accessibility, and it is also an affirmation of Xiaomi's active exploration of technology applications, friendship with users, mutual trust, mutual respect, and co-creation.
In the future, Xiaomi will continue to make more new explorations in the barrier-free field, allowing more technicians to pay attention to the real needs of disabled people, and in the process of co-creating with users, continuously optimize and innovate existing technologies, Realize technology inclusiveness, and truly "let everyone in the world enjoy the better life brought by technology" .
