Zifang Huang

Colin Lea, Dianna Yee, Jaya Narain et al.

Many consumer speech recognition systems are not tuned for people with speech disabilities, resulting in poor recognition and user experience, especially for severe speech differences. Recent studies have emphasized interest in personalized speech models from people with atypical speech patterns. We propose a query-by-example-based personalized phrase recognition system that is trained using small amounts of speech, is language agnostic, does not assume a traditional pronunciation lexicon, and generalizes well across speech difference severities. On an internal dataset collected from 32 people with dysarthria, this approach works regardless of severity and shows a 60% improvement in recall relative to a commercial speech recognition system. On the public EasyCall dataset of dysarthric speech, our approach improves accuracy by 30.5%. Performance degrades as the number of phrases increases, but consistently outperforms ASR systems when trained with 50 unique phrases.

Jaya Narain, Vasudha Kowtha, Colin Lea et al.

Perceptual voice quality dimensions describe key characteristics of atypical speech and other speech modulations. Here we develop and evaluate voice quality models for seven voice and speech dimensions (intelligibility, imprecise consonants, harsh voice, naturalness, monoloudness, monopitch, and breathiness). Probes were trained on the public Speech Accessibility (SAP) project dataset with 11,184 samples from 434 speakers, using embeddings from frozen pre-trained models as features. We found that our probes had both strong performance and strong generalization across speech elicitation categories in the SAP dataset. We further validated zero-shot performance on additional datasets, encompassing unseen languages and tasks: Italian atypical speech, English atypical speech, and affective speech. The strong zero-shot performance and the interpretability of results across an array of evaluations suggests the utility of using voice quality dimensions in speaking style-related tasks.

Colin Lea, Zifang Huang, Dhruv Jain et al.

Voice assistants have become an essential tool for people with various disabilities because they enable complex phone- or tablet-based interactions without the need for fine-grained motor control, such as with touchscreens. However, these systems are not tuned for the unique characteristics of individuals with speech disorders, including many of those who have a motor-speech disorder, are deaf or hard of hearing, have a severe stutter, or are minimally verbal. We introduce an alternative voice-based input system which relies on sound event detection using fifteen nonverbal mouth sounds like "pop," "click," or "eh." This system was designed to work regardless of ones' speech abilities and allows full access to existing technology. In this paper, we describe the design of a dataset, model considerations for real-world deployment, and efforts towards model personalization. Our fully-supervised model achieves segment-level precision and recall of 88.6% and 88.4% on an internal dataset of 710 adults, while achieving 0.31 false positives per hour on aggressors such as speech. Five-shot personalization enables satisfactory performance in 84.5% of cases where the generic model fails.