With 8 billion voice assistants in use globally by 2023, the future will be voice-first, but that future doesn’t include people with Down syndrome. Voice technology often doesn’t understand the community’s unique speech patterns, leaving them behind in the voice revolution. As a marginalized community, their needs were never considered.

The Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) had two problems to solve on a minuscule budget:

1- Make voice technology accessible to people with Down syndrome

2- Shift perceptions of a stigmatized community by showing how access to voice technology can lead to life-changing independence.

Young adults in the Down syndrome community are entirely capable of living independently. But to achieve self-sufficiency, they require more reminders, structure, and routine– unique needs they normally rely on caregivers for but could be answered by voice technology’s tools instead. This meant that access to voice assistants could offer life-changing independence for an entire community.

With 8 billion voice assistants in use globally by 2023, the future will be voice-first, but that future doesn’t include people with Down syndrome. Voice technology’s algorithm often doesn’t understand the community’s unique speech patterns, leaving them behind in the voice revolution.

To increase access to Google’s voice technology, we turned the Down syndrome community into Google’s teachers. We worked with Google– a technology that usually teaches us– and empowered people with Down syndrome to use their voice, and voice data, to be the ones teaching Google.

Introducing Project Understood, a campaign that turns people with Down syndrome into Google’s teachers, by recruiting them to donate their voice data to train Google’s speech recognition model to understand them. Making voice technology more inclusive, by including people with Down syndrome in creating the solution. And empowering the community by turning a speech limitation into a valuable data asset to future-proof themselves.

Voice technology requires millions of data points (human voices) to perform optimally. Unfortunately, for those with Down syndrome, the small size of their community means these AI systems are lacking the data they need to reliably understand them. So the CDSS played an essential role in directly recruiting the niche Down syndrome community and collecting a large enough data sample that could recognize the unique patterns in their speech and retrain Google’s voice algorithm. Data collection was critical, because it was the missing piece to unlocking voice technology for people with Down syndrome – giving them access to life-changing independence

Google’s voice assistant has the most market share in Canada, yet currently misunderstands about one in every three words of a person with Down syndrome. This made Google the ideal partner for CDSS as they would have the greatest impact on the Down syndrome community in Canada.

Voice technology requires millions of data points (human voices) to perform optimally. Unfortunately, for those with Down syndrome, the small size of their community means these AI systems lack the data to reliably understand them. CDSS directly recruited the Down syndrome community to collect enough data that Google’s voice algorithm could start to learn the unique patterns in their speech. Data collection was critical to unlocking voice technology for people with Down syndrome – giving them access to life-changing independence.

Google’s voice assistant has the most market share in Canada, yet currently misunderstands about one in every three words of a person with Down syndrome. This made Google the ideal partner for CDSS as they would have the greatest impact on the Down syndrome community in Canada.

Project Understood was a rallying cry for the Down syndrome community to donate their voice to Google and improve voice technology for everyone. The campaign launched during Canadian Down Syndrome Week, with social videos acting as a recruitment tool, mobilizing and empowering the community the community to be part of the solution.

With only $1000 in media, we targeted this niche Down syndrome community organically, knowing the more they engaged, the more we’d reach them. Through email and organic social, we engineered direct outreach to Down syndrome groups across North America to collect voice data, who in turn engaged another 735 international Down syndrome groups to participate.

Participants were driven to Projectunderstood.ca where they received a login to enter Chit Chat– an engine for raw data collection and machine learning, where participants were served pre-determined phrases guided by speech pathologists and Google AI scientists. Chit Chat was designed to capture the speech patterns/characteristics required to train Google’s AI and voice assistant technology.

Earned media further amplified our message, changing perceptions of the community.

Project Understood achieved global reach. ROI is incalculable, but on a cost per impression basis, 775,000 impressions per $ spent isn’t bad. Other campaign results:

Recruiting the community:

-826,107 organic reach on Facebook (a 678% increase from the CDSS’s best performing campaign) and 82,995 engagements - with just $1,000 in media

-30+ countries and 735 Down syndrome organizations participated

-Over one million voices were donated to Google’s speech recognition database

Changing public perceptions:

-775 million earned media impressions globally.

Project Understood is making voice technology inclusive for the Down syndrome community. Google and CDSS presented their research at the UN on March 20th, 2020, calling on all technology companies to make voice technology accessible. In the Spring of 2021, Google launched a new beta voice assistant, based on the data we helped capture, showing Project Understood’s long-term impact on a vulnerable community.