- Co-design Workshop
- UX & UI Design
- Web Dev
Voice For Purpose is a project created by a consortium of companies of excellence: Nemo Lab, a technology center for neuromuscular disease research; Università Campus Bio-Medico, a technological innovation hub for neuromuscular diseases; and Translated, a global leader in providing artificial intelligence-assisted language services. Voice For Purpose’s technology allows voice synthesizer sounds to be replaced with expressive human voices donated by ordinary people on a voluntary basis.
Translated and Moze have a long-standing partnership for UX & UI Design activities and technology development. Marco, CEO of Translated, and Simone, VP of Product, asked us to work together in this new project as well.
Translated involved Moze in the creation of the web platform that allows:
- donors to record their own voices;
- patients, potential users of artificial voices, to explore the catalog of voices and request the most suitable one.
A problem worth solving
Translated has made technology available to this cause that generates computerized voice models that can simulate donors’ vocal characteristics, making it possible to artificially reproduce their speech with the right timbre, inflection, intonation and expressiveness through Alternative Augmented Communicators (AAC) devices.
Understanding the user journey
Together with the team led by Fabio Minazzi, Director of Audiovisual at Translated, we investigated project requirements with a Co-design Workshop. This is a process inspired by several Agile methodologies (including Google Ventures’ Design Sprint and User Story Mapping) that we have designed and optimized over the years.
During the workshop, we gathered ideas and input from the Voice for Purpose team. We sketched out the main screens and flow of the two types of users: the donor and the potential user of a voice.
Donor and patient user experience
We designed and developed the web platform interface for the donor, aiming to realize the easiest path for account creation and voice recording of the audio sample.
For patients, potential users of donated voices, we created a catalog that would make it easy to find the most suitable voice based on gender, native language, and age of the patient.
Flexible and scalable full-stack development
For Voice for Purpose we were asked to do full stack development of the web platform. There were already several donors and patients interested in the initiative: we needed a technology solution that would allow them to go live in a short time.
We chose Firebase, Google’s Cloud development platform. Firebase allows a back-end to be built relatively quickly, delegating much implementation and configuration logic to Google’s infrastructure and systems.
In particular, we chose:
- Firestore, the NoSQL database that enables rapid storage and querying of large amounts of data.
- Firebase Authentication, for managing user registration and login.
- Firebase Storage, to store files uploaded by users when recording the audio sample.
- Firebase Hosting, to host the front-end web applications.
Front-end side we chose to develop the client applications using React, a JavaScript library among the most robust and popular for web software development.
Thanks to this architecture we were able to finish the development of the first release, the one dedicated to donors, in just six weeks.
«Moze was able to interpret and manage all phases of the Voice for Purpose project, from the analysis of the overall goals to the implementation of the details, which are very important for a public-facing portal. That’s a reliable and competent team.»
Fabio Minazzi
Director of Audiovisual, TranslatedThe launch and presentation at the European Parliament
The Voice For Purpose project was presented in February 2023 at the Italian office of the European Parliament, with a message from World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuse, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the participation of the European Commission’s Director-General for Health and Food Safety, Sandra Gallina, and Health Minister Orazio Schillaci.
