This Is How Two Indians & Some Amazing Technology Helped Stephen Hawking Talk Like Never Before

When Stephen Hawking came to Mumbai in 2001, he was already succumbing to ALS, his body slowly giving up on him. He had already lost his voice in 1985 to a tracheotomy. With only the use of his fingers and thumbs left (to some extent) he was using a voice synthesizer program called Equalizer to communicate. However, it was far too slow for his liking, so Hawking turned to a couple of Indian engineers to help.

In 2000, Arun Mehta and Vickram Crishna started radiophony.com, a platform to develop audio-centric solutions to help the under-privileged. A year later, during a visit to Mumbai, Hawking met the two and asked if they could develop a better alternative to his speech output process. The result of that, was ¡®eLocutor¡¯, a single-button typing and speaking software, allowing Hawking to select the words he wanted even with limited mobility. The best part was that it had predictive language software that would learn from his habits over time, allowing him to type only pieces of most words to get full sentences. Mehta and Crishna also released the software online as open source, allowing anyone to embrace and tweak it for their own solutions. But eLocutor had to have hardware Hawking and his assistants could work with .

(L-R) Travis Bonifield & Rob Weatherly from Intel, Hawking

That¡¯s where Intel comes in. Over the years, the company has been innovating in various ways in order to give Hawking his voice back. ¡°Working with Stephen was the most meaningful and challenging endeavor of my life,¡± Intel Fellow Lama Nachman said. ¡°It fed my soul and really hit home how technology can profoundly improve people¡¯s lives. We will continue developing and refining this technology in the open source community in his honor, to reach all people in need. This is something he cared about deeply.¡±

Hawking met Intel co-founder Gordon Moore at a conference around 1997. Gordon noted that Stephen was using an AMD machine and asked him, ¡°Would you like to use an Intel computer moving forward?

In January 2001, Hawking got his first custom-built computer from Intel at age 59. It was the start of a decades-long relationship with Travis Bonifield, and application manager for Intel. In fact, Bonifield traveled to the UK every few years after that to hand-deliver a customized system to the scientist. Hawking even has dedicated tech support in the form of Robert Weatherly, in Intel¡¯s Swindon office a couple of hours away from his residence.

Hawking's own PC

In 2012, Stephen Hawking was using a system of three major parts; a Lenovo X220 tablet PC with an Intel Core i7 processor, a custom black box containing various peripherals and the hardware voice itself. The PC also had a forward-facing webcam Hawking would use to make Skype calls. The black box was mounted under the wheelchair, containing an audio amplifier, voltage regulators and a USB hardware key receiving input from the IR sensor on Hawking¡¯s eyeglasses. The voice synthesizer meanwhile was located in another black box on the back of the chair and received commands from the computer.

A decade before then, Hawking still had some use of his thumbs. ¡°In fact, he¡¯d still attempt to drive his own wheelchair. He pinned me against the wall once,¡± Bonifield laughs. So Hawking had a binary switch in his hand, basically a clicker, that he would use to highlight words or commands on the computer screen. Because of how tedious the process was, he was typing at about one word a minute.

However, over time even that little bit of movement left him by 2012. The solution Intel came up with was the IR sensor hanging off his glasses. It would detect whenever Hawking twitched his cheek, letting him find an alternate way to type with a ¡°cheek switch¡± instead of his clicker. Unfortunately, it was still really slow.

Intel

A communication breakthrough

Eventually, Hawking sent an email to Moore asking, ¡°My speech input is very, very slow these days. Is there any way Intel could help?¡±. In response, Intel was able to develop a newer system in 2014, one that used multiple facial expressions for speech input like mouth and eyebrow movements. They also improved his system¡¯s word predictor, so he would have to make fewer selections in order to select the words he wanted to use, improving his speed for all basic computer tasks by a factor of ten. The tool was such a success that Intel later released the toolkit online for free in 2015, so other researchers and technologists could create customized solutions of their own.

Hawking¡¯s computer system used a rudimentary timed interface. A cursor automatically scanned across an on-screen keyboard, and whenever he blinked it would trigger an infrared sensor on his cheek. This stops the moving cursor and selects whatever key or option the cursor was highlighting at the time. Intel¡¯s engineers claim they might¡¯ve built a better method, but Hawking didn¡¯t want a completely new system.

In 2014, Intel decided Hawking needed two separate communication systems. Everytime the scientist took a trip, his assistants would have to remove the various pieces of the computer, voice synthesizer, etc from his main wheelchair (which he only uses in the UK), and mount them onto a folding travel wheelchair. Setting up the same system on both wheelchairs helped save a massive amount of time for the ailing genius.

His assistants could then simply disconnect his laptop, without even turning it off, and shift it to the travel chair along with him. In addition, it also helped save time whenever Intel engineers came over to set up new parts. Instead of Interrupting Hawking¡¯s work, they could just install and test on the travel chair, before shifting Hawking and installing everything on the regular chair.

Bonifield says that he¡¯s often asked what it was like to work with Hawking and notes that in his experience the renowned physicist was simply ¡°Stephen¡± and no one who knew him for more than a few minutes kept up with formalities.

¡°But Hawking himself is, out of necessity, a person of few words and the words he does choose to share are direct and purposeful, but also kind.¡±

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