Malaprop Monitor

Getting a bit long in the tooth? Neurons starting to fire a bit off-key? Use the wrong word from time to time?

It is a truism that those of us who suffer the bitter embarassment of Alzheimer's that is the reward for many long lives often have trouble speaking. The mind may function more or less well some days, but a certain aphasic effect causes the tongue to trip even on our best days. There are, of course, many of us who speak with a bit less skill than we would prefer. This device is for such people.

The advent of modern microprocessors and the concomitant miniaturization of other electronic devices now makes it possible to construct a system small enough as to be easily portable that can monitor your speech patterns and correct your grammatical and contextual mistakes in real time.

Easily disquised as a shirt-pocket hearing aid or cell phone - and perhaps even doubling as either or even both - the monitor uses off-the-shelf voice recognition software to keep track of what you say, and in what context. The system is optimized for text management and nothing else, so it need have no accessible memory or large processing capacity for anything besides this one job. As you speak, the software translates your words into text it can analyze, and sound a discrete tone to warn you of errors it has noticed. There will be a fairly short period early in the use of the device as it "learns" your particular speech nuances and tonal qualities, but its accuracy can only improve, and it will catch your accidental slips of the tongue quickly enough to allow you to correct yourself before your audience has enough time to get caught up on your verbal slips. Perhaps, with such immediate correction, the device could act as a training aid for the aphasic or Alzheimer's sufferer and lead to an overall improvement of communication skills.

This idea comes from my wife, whose grandfather, a bright and direct man in his youth, eventually died virtually mute after a long, erosive struggle with Alzheimer's.