Project Understood

FCB Canada

Brand: Canadian Down Syndrome Society

Year: 2019

Voice technology requires millions of data points (human voices) to perform optimally. Unfortunately, for those with Down syndrome, the smaller size of their community means these AI systems are lacking the data they need to reliably understand them.

Google’s voice assistant has the most market share in Canada, yet currently misunderstands about one in every three words of a person with Down syndrome. This made Google the ideal partner for Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS), as it would have the greatest impact on the Down syndrome community in Canada.

Introducing “Project Understood,” a campaign that leveraged people with Down syndrome as Google’s teachers, using their voices to train Google’s speech recognition model to more accurately understand them. This campaign marked a major step forward in making voice technology more inclusive, by including people with Down syndrome in creating the solution.