Educational System for the Holy Quran and Its Sciences for Blind and Handicapped People Based on Google Speech API

Abstract

There is a great need to provide educational environments for blind and handicapped people. There are many Islamic websites and applications dedicated to the educational services for the Holy Quran and Its Sciences (Quran Recitations, the interpretations, etc.) on the Internet. Unfortunately, blind and handicapped people could not use these services. These people cannot use the keyboard and the mouse. In addition, the ability to read and write is essential to benefit from these services. In this paper, we present an educational environment that allows these people to take full advantage of the scientific materials. This is done through the interaction with the system using voice commands by speaking directly without the need to write or to use the mouse. Google Speech API is used for the universal speech recognition after a preprocessing and post processing phases to improve the accuracy. For blind people, responses of these commands will be played back through the audio device instead of displaying the text to the screen. The text will be displayed on the screen to help other people make use of the system.

Share and Cite:

Mohamed, S. , Hassanin, A. and Othman, M. (2014) Educational System for the Holy Quran and Its Sciences for Blind and Handicapped People Based on Google Speech API. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 7, 150-161. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2014.73017.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1] Mad Saad, S., Md Zain, M.Z., Hussein, M., Yaacob, M.S., Musa, A.R. and Abdullah, M.Y. (2010) A System Architecture of Electronic Braille Panel for Reciting Al-Quran. 2th International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Modelling and Simulation, Bali, 28-30 September 2010, 427-430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CIMSiM.2010.56
[2] Abdallah, J., Abualkishik, M. and Omar, K. (2009) Quranic Braille System. International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 3, 313-319.
[3] Abdul Khoni, N.A., Robason, A., Abdullah, Y., Musa, A.R., Md Zain, M.Z., Yaacob, M.S. and Hussein, M. (2010) A Novel Development of Electronic Braille. 2010 International Conference on Science and Social Research (CSSR 2010), 5-7 December 2010, Kuala Lumpur, 560-564.
[4] Mssraty, T. and Faryadi, Q. (2012) Teaching the Qur’anic Recitation with Harakatt: A Multimedia-Based Interactive Learning Method. International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, 3.
[5] Abdo, M.S., Kandil, A.H., El-Bialy, A.M. and Fawzy, S.A. (2010) Automatic Detection for Some Common Pronunciation Mistakes Applied to Chosen Quran Sounds. 5th Cairo International Biomedical Engineering Conference, Cairo, 16-18 December 2010, 219-222.
[6] Abdou, S.M., Hamid, S.E., Rashwan, M., Samir, A., Abd-Elhamid, O., Shahin, M. and Nazih, W. (2006) Computer Aided Pronunciation Learning System Using Speech Recognition Techniques. Proceedings of International Conference on Speech and Language Processing, Pittsburgh, 17-21 September 2006, 849-852.
[7] Yekache, Y., Mekelleche, Y. and Kouninef, B. (2011) Towards Quranic Reader Controlled by Speech. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2, 134-137.
http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2011.021123
[8] Ali, M., Elshafei, M., Al-Ghamdi, M., Al-Muhtaseb, H. and Al-Najjar, A. (2009) Generation of Arabic Phonetic Dictionaries for Speech Recognition. Journal of Information Technology Research, 2, 67-80.
[9] Razak, Z., Ibrahim, N.J., Idris, M.Y.I., Tamil, E.M., Yakub, M., Yusoff, Z.M. and Rahman, N.N.A. (2008) Quranic Verse Recitation Recognition Module for Support in j-QAF Learning: A Review. IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, 8, 207-216.
[10] Carnegie Mellon University (2010) Sphinx—Speech Recognition Toolkit.
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/
[11] Lamere, P., Kwok, P., Gouvea, E.B., Raj, B., Singh, R., Walker, W. and Wolf, P. (2003) The CMU SPHINX-4 Speech Recognition System. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 46, 37-51.
[12] Abushariah, M.A.M., Ainon, R.N., Zainuddin, R., Elshafei, M. and Khalifa, O.O. (2010) Natural Speaker-Independent Arabic Speech Recognitionsystem Based on Hidden Markov Models Using Sphinx Tools. 2010 International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering, Kuala Lumpur, 11-12 May 2010, 1-6.
[13] Satori, H., Harti, M. and Chenfour, N. (2007) Introduction to Arabic Speech Recognition Using CMUSphinx System. Information and Communication Technologies International Symposium, Fes, 3-5 July 2007, 4 p.
[14] Hyassat, H. and Abu Zitar, R. (2008) Arabic Speech Recognition Using SPHINX Engine. International Journal of Speech Technology, 9, 133-150.
[15] Cambridge (2010) HTK—Hidden Markov Model Toolkit—Speech Recognition Toolkit.
http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/
[16] Young, S., Evermann, G., Gales, M., Hain, T., Kershaw, D., Liu, X., Moore, G., Odell, J., Ollason, D., Povey, D., Valtchev, V. and Woodland, P. (1996) The HTK Book. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
[17] Tabbal, H., El-Falou, W. and Monla, B. (2006) Analysis and Implementation of a “Quranic” verses Delimitation System in Audio Files Using Speech Recognition Techniques. Proceeding of the IEEE Conference of 2nd Information and Communication Technologies, 2, 2979-2984.
[18] Ahmad, A.M., Ismail, S. and Samaon, D.F. (2004) Recurrent Neural Network with Backpropagation through Time for Speech Recognition. IEEE International Symposium on Communications & Information Technology, 1, 98-102.
[19] Jurafsky, D. and Martin, J.H. (2007) Automatic Speech Recognition. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.
[20] IslamCity Website. http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/quran/
[21] IslamWay Website. The Most Famous Broadcast Website about Islam. http://en.islamway.net/
[22] Quran Readings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qur%27an_recitation

Copyright © 2023 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

Creative Commons License

This work and the related PDF file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.