Abstract
Assistive speech-enabled systems are proposed to help both French and English speaking persons with various speech disorders. The proposed assistive systems use automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech synthesis in order to enhance the quality of communication. These systems aim at improving the intelligibility of pathologic speech making it as natural as possible and close to the original voice of the speaker. The resynthesized utterances use new basic units, a new concatenating algorithm and a grafting technique to correct the poorly pronounced phonemes. The ASR responses are uttered by the new speech synthesis system in order to convey an intelligible message to listeners. Experiments involving four American speakers with severe dysarthria and two Acadian French speakers with sound substitution disorders (SSDs) are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods. An improvement of the Perceptual Evaluation of the Speech Quality (PESQ) value of 5%and more than 20% is achieved by the speech synthesis systems that deal with SSD and dysarthria, respectively.
Highlights
The ability to communicate through speaking is an essential skill in our society
The normalized log energy is found, which is added to the 12 Mel-Frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) to form a 13-dimensional vector
The results showed that the frame length played a crucial role in the dysarthric speech recognition
Summary
The ability to communicate through speaking is an essential skill in our society. Several studies revealed that up to 60% of persons with speech impairments have experienced difficulties in communication abilities, which have severely disrupted their social life [1]. According to the Canadian Association of Speech Language Pathologists & Audiologists (CASLPA), one out of ten Canadians suffers from a speech or hearing disorder. These people face various emotional and psychological problems. Despite this negative impact on these people, on their families, and on the society, very few alternative communication systems have been developed to assist them [2]. Speech troubles are typically classified into four categories: articulation disorders, fluency disorders, neurologically-based disorders, and organic disorders
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