Development of a Real-time Bionic Voice Generation System based on Statistical Excitation Prediction

Abstract

Despite the emergent progress in many fields of bionics, larynx amputees still lack a functional Bionic Voice source to overcome their voice disability. We have established the Pneumatic Bionic Voice (PBV) as a promising technology to generate a voice for larynx amputees. This summary provides an overview of our efforts to implement the PBV system in real-time together with a demonstration of its results. The PBV is an electronic adaptation of an old school mechanical voice source called the Pneumatic Artificial Larynx (PAL). The PAL is a non-invasive voice prosthesis, with an exceptionally high-quality voice, driven exclusively by respiration. This work proposes an approach to statistically model the PAL's voice generation mechanism from the respiration and to implement it in a real-time PBV system that larynx amputees can use to generate voice in continuous speech.