Goncalo Leal

h-index6
2papers

2 Papers

29.9AIMay 1
Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

Shakeel Sheikh, Patrick Marmaroli, MD Sahidullah et al.

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

CLMay 31, 2025
Clinical Annotations for Automatic Stuttering Severity Assessment

Ana Rita Valente, Rufael Marew, Hawau Olamide Toyin et al.

Stuttering is a complex disorder that requires specialized expertise for effective assessment and treatment. This paper presents an effort to enhance the FluencyBank dataset with a new stuttering annotation scheme based on established clinical standards. To achieve high-quality annotations, we hired expert clinicians to label the data, ensuring that the resulting annotations mirror real-world clinical expertise. The annotations are multi-modal, incorporating audiovisual features for the detection and classification of stuttering moments, secondary behaviors, and tension scores. In addition to individual annotations, we additionally provide a test set with highly reliable annotations based on expert consensus for assessing individual annotators and machine learning models. Our experiments and analysis illustrate the complexity of this task that necessitates extensive clinical expertise for valid training and evaluation of stuttering assessment models.