Giving Stephen Hawking a voice
Yahoo has a much more technically detailed article about the software, including a video showing the software in action. <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-intel-helped-stephen-hawking-communicate-with-104112393054.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-intel-helped-stephen-hawking-...</a><p>Direct link to the screen-capture video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPU6mnM2i-k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPU6mnM2i-k</a><p>TL;DR Hawking only has a single reliable, low-latency binary signal (facial muscle movements), so his interface has been a constantly-moving cursor that he can "click" when it's over the next symbol/command he wishes to select. The innovations here are in the interpretation of those selections: he now has autosuggest for text (designed specifically for him based on the corpus of his works) and shortcuts for filesystem management.<p>I'm looking forward to seeing when the source code is released, or when a paper is written. Just looking at the data-entry video, for instance, there are interesting parallels between the timing specifications for Hawking's Yes/No dialog and GUI design for dialogs for non-disabled users - in both cases, if there's not enough spacing in between buttons, or orderings are unpredictable, it's much easier for someone to mis-click!