A 16-year-old boy from Panipat, India has invented a portable device that allows a computer to construct complete sentences from the breaths of speech-impaired persons.

Arsh Shah Dilbagi, also known as Robo, has developed a generic, fast, lightweight and portable device that can be mass produced while remaining affordably priced. The device records the user's exhales and transforms these to form full sentences.

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The young inventor calls his invention "Talk."

Talk has only two major parts: a wearable sensor placed near the nose or mouth and a processing unit and speaker about the size of a an average smartphone.

Dilbagi said Talk will monitor and a convert two different type of exhales. These exhales will be distinguished by their different intensities and duration of time.

The intensity and duration of the breaths will be fed to the processor, which will determine the specific breath pattern and essentially compute them into a Morse or binary coded language -- short exhales are "dots" and long exhales are labeled "dashes."

Talk currently has two modes and can speak in approximately nine different voices.

As of now, Talk communicates in English and allows user to say specific commands and phrases.

Dilbagi feels this is only the first baby-steps of what this machine will be capable of in the future, and is already working to update and upgrade the device.

Talk device has shown some very promising results and has a 99% accuracy average. It's to be sold for less than US$100, which is a fraction of the cost of competing and larger devices.

Arish and his research and development team are currently working to expand the Talk's multi-language capabilities. He hopes to integrate the technology with smartphones and Google Glass in the near future.

Talk isn't the first augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device on the market, however. Steven Hawking uses a similar yet different AAC device that reads and computes eye movement.

Most of the current AAC devices are very large and bulky. They come with many wires and sensors particular to each user and typically have to be customized for each application. This makes other devices very expensive. 

TagsAAC, AAC Device, Young Inventor, Augmentative Alternative Communication, Google Glass, talk, Arsh Shah Dilbagi