Around January 2020 I was approached by the company Auris Tech for a commissioned illustration of the ebook “Seals on Land” by Karolina Ros Olafsdottir. Auris Tech is a company that specialises in voice recognition softwares, in the development and deployment of ASR (Adaptative Spectral Reconnaissance) and offer mass-market solutions applicable in various sectors across education, health, language and entertainment. Recently they have created a program in partnership with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, that recognises children’s read speech. This program was turned into the app Fonetti that serves the purpose of aiding children with literacy issues, focused on improving reading, enunciation and spelling.
I was immediately captivated by this fascinating project, not only because I was curious as to how the software functions, in terms of the visual work in conjunction with voice activation, but mainly due to the company’s aims and aspirations that consist in improving people’s lives, while also using Art as an essential part of the process. The app features a vast collection of ebooks created specially for different age groups, and therefore easily accessible to different audiences.