An Embedded Module as "VIRTUAL TONGUE" for Voiceless

There are several human disabilities in nature of which speech impaired people find difficulty in communicating with others, which is very important to convey their messages without speech. In this paper, to make them self reliable and independent, with the advent of embedded systems technology an embedded handheld icon based assistive device as “Virtual Tongue” for Voiceless, which speaks for severely speech disordered people by simply pressing icons appropriately to fulfill their needs, is proposed. This proposed module comprises a microcontroller based player to play voice messages, Secure Digital (SD) card reader, Universal Serial Bus (USB) port, icon based remote keypad, audio amplifier and speaker along with the benefits like portable, reliable, user friendly, affordable cost, low power consumption and of course speech in regional language with good clarity. The proposed system is designed to produce speech regardless of time length, audible to the neighbors, based on the request from the user by pressing the icons thereby this module deserves inarticulate people. An extended version with a feature of converting text into voice by adding a circuit, with which any text fed through a keyboard can be converted into speech, is also discussed.