Visualizing Inclusion

Apropos of his position as Chief Vision Officer for CommuniClique, and rooted in Open Source and Universal Design, Danny Boice has a sense of the ability of CommuniClique technology to support inclusion for persons with disabilities in new ways. He is intensely interested in the transfer of what many would see solely as a business tool into usage that will permit increased participation, learning, and productivity through the speech-to-text transcription and multi-sensory features of the product he has created.

Software as a Service: CommuniClique

The heart of CommuniClique is simple and efficient communication and collaboration. It is a ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) system allowing teams or ‘cliques’ to hold meetings from their desktops face-to-face with audio and video, presenting all the communicative benefits of eye-contact, gestures, and voice intonation in real-time, as well as offering video quality that is robust enough for lip-reading. The system’s feature set inherently allows it to serve social networking and bookmarking functions. Screen sharing allows users to upload, store, and collaboratively or independently edit a range of document types, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. A  virtual Whiteboard permits collaborative writing and annotation, supporting idea development, problem solving, and teaching, and thus is heavily used in E-Learning, especially for professional, management, and technical training through private online universities and organizations.  

Danny explains one benefit to school districts offering their own web services, “You can completely ‘private-brand it, everything from the URL to the logo to the colors, so nobody knows it’s CommuniClique that is running behind the scenes.”  All of this, however, is only the beginning.

Closed Captioning and More!

Danny digs deeper into the unique power of CommuniClique, elaborating:

Our product is 100 percent browser based with no annoying installations or deployments needed. As long as you have a web cam, you’ll have video feed. With just the click of a mouse, you’ll have the closed captioning mode — no extra cost and no effort to set things up.

Although Skype support is provided, users can simply plug in a headset and use a browser to communicate with others on the system. CommuniClique records every telephone call and stores it as audio in MP3, as video, and in the upcoming version, as text. This allows universal access as well as the capacity to revisit sections of any conversation or work session:

From an architecture standpoint, one of the big things that allows us to do (captioning) successfully is that when you’re on a phone call through our system, you’re in a sort of traditional conference room — just like if you dialed into a conference bridge. The difference is we’ve structured our server farm to treat each person’s voice as a separate channel. So we can actually take each person who is talking, separately and with no noise or overlap, take time stamps of when they say what, and transcribe each person’s voice independently. Then we superimpose them back over each other just like you would see in an instant message transcript.

Danny feels this amazing capacity yields benefits especially for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing in regard to seeing captions in real time, as well as to save transcripts for future use, without the aid of human auxiliary service provider based interpreting or captioning services. Beta testing is in progress for this capability, but he anticipates accuracy in the 90-95% range. Users can scroll through the audio/video components to find specific sections, and the text will be fully searchable.

Accessibility Accommodates International Development Issues

This sense of applicability for persons with hearing disabilities was inadvertently fostered by Andy Powers, the co-developer and CEO of CommuniClique, who happens to be hard of hearing due to childhood spinal meningitis. Danny reports that Andy began finding some of the features especially helpful as the production process unfolded. These features should also offer important functionality to other populations that need clarity, multiple sensory inputs, and repetition, including the large population of individuals with learning disabilities.

Danny continues,

Lately we’ve had a lot of interest from the education market, teachers in public and private schools want to use it for children with disabilities and for E-Learning with the unique kinds of applications it offers. A lot of independent online universities are using it, and another interesting application has been users with English as a Second Language.

On the last point, Danny again offers direct experience. His company is multinational, with substantial development coordinated with overseas offices. Initially, communication problems among developers with varying first languages posed significant problems. Once CommuniClique was sufficiently developed, it was put into use in web meetings with developers. Danny reports that communication breakdowns virtually disappeared through that repetition and confirmation of understanding.

In February of 2009, CommuniClique scored a victory by publically announcing that it added substantially to its previous base of well over 100,000 international users with a partnership with FedEx, which uses the system for internal communications and work sharing. In turn, FedEx supports CommuniClique by offering the service of reproducing, packaging, and shipping transcripts of net meetings all over the world.

Principles of Simplicity and Low Cost

Danny explains that at CommuniClique, “A lot of our solutions aren’t all that technically complex, they’re just these, ‘Why didn’t I think of that’ implementations’. We look for what makes sense, the simplest answer.’  This was the case for the separate voice channel solution, which other companies had overlooked in trying to create transcription capability while attempting to solve logistical challenges with conversational overlap and confusion. Danny continues,

We don’t want to make this some fancy ‘whizbang interface’, our design principles are that we want to make it easy from a design perspective, and we also want to make it easy from an implementation perspective. From day one our goal has been, ‘How can we make it the easiest to use, most obvious interface?’ and not because we had any specific audience in mind. The obvious thing for our customers is you can be up and running in two minutes. You don’t need to spend the money on the hardware, on somebody on your local network to install, support, and maintain it — we do that.  If you have an internet connection, you can use our service. Simple.

Danny regards the economy as something approaching a moral imperative, especially in challenging economic environments. He explains, to his delight,

The biggest feedback we get is cost-related: the fact that we’re so much less expensive in doing what most [telecom companies do]. We just completely blow that out of the water pricewise. We’ve shown up and gained momentum at a good time.

Open Source Evolution and Crowd Sourcing

Danny gives a great deal of credit to the open source community:

There are a lot of open source projects that have tackled voice to text — you ‘Google’ voice-to-text transcription and you get a million hits. Historically a lot of innovations have started off in that space. We’re very active in that community, and much of the back end systems we use, including the application that dials out to people, our Skype and PDC audio support, and video streaming algorithms have come from that involvement. We have a true modular and ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ (SOA), a big buzzword these days. It allows flexibility, let’s us make our AVI particulary public to our developer’s network, and makes integration with other ‘apps’ really easy.

Moreover, Danny positioned himself well with specific experiences that have helped him to build a unique product. He explains that, first,

I was a software engineer with musicmaker.com, one of the big ‘dot com’ start ups. We were one of the early adopters of open source free commerce with SOAP/XML. I’ve always been interested in that, which rolled up into Crowdsourceing, basically getting a lot of people together collectively to make something — to make it better — than could be done in a silo.

From that early experience, Danny went on to establish a company, Jaxara (sold in 2006), in which he:

Patented a process for getting a project done using development teams on several continents so you have a 24 hour work schedule, giving greater efficiencies and cost savings to the client. We specialized in getting ideas to market quickly without great expense.

All of these connections and experiences have been leveraged to create the power, simplicity, and extremely cost efficient elements that characterize the system, and allow it to stand out among competitors.

Seeking Input

Well aware of the value of collaboration, Danny is now seeking inputs to make his evolving product even more beneficial to users who have special needs. He hopes to work with NCTI stakeholders, users, and other partners to inform additional development in this vein, explaining,

We want to make sure this truly is viable, and is something people are really going to care about in the educational space — are there things that could be even more helpful? We would like honest feedback and assessment.