The VOICE Project website has been developed and managed, from its beginning in 1996 until the closing conference of the European Year of People with Disabilities in 2003, by the Project Coordinator, an official of the Joint Research Centre of the EC. In this role, he has made some subsequent updates, while since 2012 he has been taking care of occasional updates privately, with the agreement of the EC, in order to preserve the historical memory of a particularly significant awareness-raising action. Therefore, a revision of the Historical Site is not planned, but a gradual update of the indexes of these introduction pages of the Site to highlight contributions of current interest.
In the Historical Site there are no links to the Current Site: it is recommended to open the links in new windows.
Since 1996, within the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (Ispra, Varese), the VOICE Project has contributed to the study, development, and dissemination of aids that could allow people with hearing impairments to become more active members of our society. Two years later, sponsored and funded by the Directorate-General for the Information Society of the EC, a voice recognition system was created capable of subtitling, in real time, conferences, school and university lessons, telephone conversations, broadcasts, and live shows. The demonstration prototype of the Project attracted particular attention and, thanks to its presentation and use in over a hundred conferences and seminars, managed to raise public awareness of the needs of the hearing impaired and the necessity of applying such software in as many sectors as possible.
This initial success was followed by numerous collaborations with a wide range of partners: in 2001-2002, with the European Union of Television and the standardization body CENELEC, work was carried out to harmonize the criteria for producing television subtitles; with RAI and other television broadcasters, to enhance the teletext subtitle service; with associations of the hearing impaired, schools, and universities, to experiment the system.
After a particular emphasis coinciding with the European Year of People with Disabilities in 2003, several initiatives were undertaken in 2004 to further spread these applications. Subsequently, various projects were studied with the aim of advancing research towards the creation of tools capable of increasingly bridging the social gap between the disabled, especially the deaf and the blind, and the rest of the population, thanks to applications useful for all citizens.