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How Indian Engineers Helped Stephen Hawking 'talk'

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Arun Mehta is an Indian software developer and a disability activist. At the request of Stephen Hawking, he, along with Vickram Crishna, developed a free and open source software named eLocutor, to allow severely disabled person to write and speak.


One of science’s biggest celebrities since Albert Einstein, renown cosmologist Stephen Hawking passed away at the age of 76 in the early hours of Wednesday. The author of the best-selling book A Brief History of Time was born on January 9, 1942 (the 300th death anniversary of Galileo) and died on Wednesday (the 139th birthday of Einstein).


In India, fans and well-wishers of the pioneering physicist took to social media to pay their heartfelt tributes to one of the greatest minds of our time. However, few of them know that it was a technology developed by Indian engineers that helped Professor Hawking (who lost his voice in 1985 after a tracheotomy) talk again.

Mehta and Crishna

In January 2001, Stephen Hawking arrived in India for the first time for a 16-day long tour he would later describe as “magnificent”.
In the first leg of the tour in Mumbai, Hawking attended an international physics seminar at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), delivered the Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture (titled ‘Predicting the Future: From Astrology to Black Holes’) and celebrated his 59th birthday on January 8, 2001 at the Oberoi Towers hotel where he stayed.
Following this, Hawking — who had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (better known as ALS) when he was just 21 — travelled around Mumbai in a specially redesigned vehicle that could accommodate his wheelchair.
It was during this time that his aides began reaching out to several people and organisations who could help write a software program that would help Hawking communicate through his computerised wheelchair (he had been facing problems with the software he was using at the time).
The men who decided to take up this challenge were Arun Mehta and Vickram Crishna, the latter of whom had met Hawking in Mumbai.

eLocutor

Single Button Typing and Speaking SoftwareProfessor Stephen Hawking and many like him can only operate a single button. Their ability to communicate with the world hinges on software that allows them to efficiently enter text into a computer and have it spoken for them, only through the operation of this single button. eLoctor was designed for Prof. Hawking to allow him to Type, Speak, and Command the computer.

eLocutor is distributed under GPL and is free.

In the 2007 OReilly publication "Beautiful Code", in which  Leading Programmers Explain How They Think. In the book Dr. Arun Mehta wrote a Chapter on eLocutor "When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World".

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