UrFU Student Develops Voice Assistant for People with Disabilities

11:33, June 19, 2024

Boris Bredikhin won the All-Russian Engineering Competition

The finals of the All-Russian Engineering Competition took place at the VK headquarters in Moscow, where Boris Bredikhin, a Master's student of the Institute of Basic Education of UrFU, defended his work - he won first place and received a cash prize. Besides Boris Bredikhin, three other students of UrFU became laureates of the competition: Danila Russo, Alexander Popov, and Maxim Domashenkov.

10,500 students from 230 universities and 81 regions of the country participated in the qualifying round. 631 students made it to the semifinals and 100 students competed for the championship.

In the finale, Boris presented his development. It is a web application that allows you to collect data with samples of atypical speech, train a model to recognize it on these samples, and use it for speech recognition in text or audio synthesis, i.e. as a means of augmented and alternative communication.

"The topic of my Master's thesis is the Development of a Voice Assistant for People with Speech Disabilities Using Artificial Intelligence. I conducted this work for 1.5 years under the supervision of Nikolay Khlebnikov, Director of the Institute of Fundamental Education, my mentor from the Ural Center for Security Systems Anna Astafieva, and my reviewer Mikhail Gushchin. As a result, a prototype was created to facilitate personal communication or interaction with voice interfaces", says Boris Bredikhin.

In the future, Boris' development may help people with disabilities, especially speech impairments, to communicate. The student himself has had a first group of disabilities since childhood: he has motor and speech disorders.

This did not prevent him from being one of the best graduates of UrFU 2024, becoming a scholarship holder of the Potanin Foundation, the winner of the regional stage of the national championship Abilympics, setting a record in triathlon, and many other achievements.

Boris plans to continue working on his project in the PhD program.

Elina Gvarishvili

The news article was translated by UrFU International Marketing Office.
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