To provide accurate figures on the potential need for and use of AAC, data need to be consistently and accurately recorded and regularly reviewed at a community level. The existing data suggest an urgent need for more accurate and up to date information to be captured about the need for AAC in the UK to provide better services and ensure access to AAC strategies, equipment and support.

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For an individual with a speech impairment, it can be necessary for them to use a device to produce synthesized speech to assist their communication. To fully support all functions of human speech communication: communication of information, maintenance of social relationships and displaying identity, the voice must be intelligible and natural-sounding. Ideally, it must also be capable of conveying the speaker’s vocal identity. A new approach based on Hidden Markov models (HMMs) has been proposed as a way of capturing sufficient information about an individual’s speech to enable a personalized speech synthesizer to be developed. This approach adapts a statistical model of speech towards the vocal characteristics of an individual. This chapter describes this approach and how it can be implemented using the HTS toolkit. Results are reported from a study that built personalized synthetic voices for two individuals with dysarthria. An evaluation of the voices by the participants themselves suggests that this technique shows promise for building personalized voices for individuals with progressive dysarthria even when their speech has begun to deteriorate.

AAC service provision in the United Kingdom (UK) has evolved since the first service dedicated to the provision of communication aids opened in 1986. Within the UK, many health and care services are provided via government funding; however, the assessment and provision of AAC and specifically of speech-generating devices (SGDs) is inconsistent and inequitable. The study reported in this paper aimed to collect information on levels of current provision of powered communication aids (the term used in the study to refer to SGDs) by UK service providers in 2013 with the intention of improving future estimates for need of services. A questionnaire survey was designed and data were obtained from 98 AAC services across the UK. Service providers reported the number of individuals known to be using powered communication aids and the mean value reported was 0.0155% of the services' catchment populations. However levels of service provision reported were highly variable. Although the data reported must be treated with caution, it adds to the sparse literature on the topic, informs AAC service design and delivery in the UK, and acts as an indicative baseline measure for future service development.

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