Is it open source or based on open source? The article seems to switch between both at random. If they've made the entire system open source that would be incredible. I think something like this, which can improve millions of lives, is the perfect project for an open source community to work on. Sick people shouldn't have to pay for this and I'm sure lots of people would be very happy to dedicate time to improving it. It's also good to know that if Intel decided to stop work on it the users who rely on it so heavily aren't screwed - the software can continue to be improved and will always be available.
> Professor Hawking has been using his new software for several months while
> Lama and her team have been debugging and fine-tuning it. It’s almost
> finished, and when it is, Intel plans to make the system available to the
> open source community.
Interesting. It says Hawking would rather stick to his old system than switch to a new one, which conflicts with reports I read like a year ago that suggested he was interested in a direct brain interface.
But perhaps it's not so surprising. He's old, and past a certain age you just don't have time to relearn everything. Your time is better spent squeezing the juice out of what you have.
>> "It says Hawking would rather stick to his old system than switch to a new one"
Huh? The quote you're replying to says he "has been using his new software for several months". Am I missing something? Is he switching back after testing? I know that he doesn't ever plan on changing the 'voice' as it has become known as his own voice but I don't see why he would test new software and then not use it. To test it you will have to learn it.
His system still uses the cheek trigger and still works more or less the same way, but improvements have been made to its word prediction and other details of its operation.
