| Faculty Members: | Professor J A Bangham Professor S J Cox Professor J R W Glauert |
| Researchers: | Dr M Lincoln (Senior Research Associate) Ms Judy Tryggvason |
TESSA, the TExt and Sign Support Assistant has been developed at UEA to meet the needs of people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Developed in collaboration with the UK Post Office, the system combines speech recognition technology and state of the art virtual human animation to enable Post Office workers to communicate with deaf customers. TESSA won a gold medal and the overall IT award at the prestigious British Computer Society's Information Technology Awards 2000.
The assistant speaks into a microphone which is then recognised by a computer speech recognition system. The speech is converted to British Sign Language and signed by the virtual human for the customer. English text can also be displayed for those who do not use sign language.
Further information is available on TESSA and the latest work on VANESSA.
