Abstract: According to the report given by 'Indian Vision Institute', it has been observed that nearly 40 million of people in India are visually disabled. Due to such population of people with disability, there is a demand for Assistive technology which can enable them to resume their daily tasks without reliance on their peers.
In pursuit of devising such a usable and reliable technology, we are designing and developing a Voice Assistant which can help the visually impaired/disabled access their Gmail services effectively as most of the internet applications and services rely on emails for effective communication of information. This architecture will reduce the cognitive load of remembering and typing characters on a keyboard by a visually disabled/impaired user. It uses features such as speech to text & text to speech engines which are used to cut down many mundane tasks while accessing/operating an email application. With a successful implementation of this system, it can be utilized by anyone and everyone at their convenience. Our voice assistant is addressed as "EVA"(email voice assistant) which takes user commands. It is designed as a web-based chrome extension which uses an Interactive voice response method to simplify the user experience. This will assist users in navigating mail accounts through their voice to perform operations like read, compose, and send a mail, further it can be scaled up to perform other useful tasks such as deleting a mail, marking as unread etc. provided by Gmail or any other emailing client.

Keywords: Voice Assistant, Chrome extension.

| DOI: 10.17148/IARJSET.2021.8730