Influence of Expressive Speech on ASR Performances: Application to Elderly Assistance in Smart Home

Abstract

Smart homes are discussed as a win-win solution for maintaining the Elderly at home as a better alternative to care homes for dependent elderly people. Such Smart homes are characterized by rich domestic commands devoted to elderly safety and comfort. The vocal command has been identified as an efficient, well accepted, interaction way, it can be directly addressed to the "habitat", or through a robotic interface. In daily use, the challenges of vocal commands recognition are the noisy environment but moreover the reformulation and the expressive change of the strictly authorized commands. This paper focuses (1) to show, on the base of elicited corpus, that expressive speech, in particular distress speech, strongly affects generic state of the art ASR systems (20 to 30%) (2) how interesting improvement thanks to ASR adaptation can regulate (15%) this degradation. We conclude on the necessary adaptation of ASR system to expressive speech when they are designed for person's assistance.

Making Emergency Calls More Accessible to Older Adults Through a Hands-free Speech Interface in the House

“…They observed a performance degradation with expressive speech when ASRs were trained with a neutral voice. These results were corroborated by Aman et al (Aman et al, 2016a) who recorded a Voix-détresse (Distress Voice) corpus which is made of emergency sentences uttered in expressive and neutral manner in an elicitation protocol. Improved performance was achieved by using an adapted acoustic model.…”

“…Povey et al (Povey et al, 2011a) showed that the model is also effective with large amounts of training data. The acoustic models were trained on 500 hours of transcribed French speech composed of the ESTER 1&2 (broadcast news and conversational speech recorded on the radio) and REPERE (TV news and talk-shows) challenges as well as from 7 hours of transcribed French speech of the SWEET-HOME corpus which consists of records of 60 speakers interacting in a smart home and from 28 minutes of the Voix-détresse corpus (Aman et al, 2016a) which is made of recordings of speakers eliciting distress.…”

Healthcare Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics: A Review and Proposed Framework

“…In [101], the authors were interested in assisting patients with sclerosis disease in a smart home and the authors of [102] studied the influence of expressive speech on automatic speech recognition performances and applied their approach on elderly people assistance.…”

Distant speech processing for smart home: comparison of ASR approaches in scattered microphone network for voice command

“…The Voix Détresse French corpus was recorded in the Domus smart home in order to determine if ASR performances can be affected by expressive speech (Aman et al, 2016 speakers had to read 20 distress sentences in a neutral manner, these sentences were extracted from the AD80 corpus (Vacher et al, 2006). Then, elicited emotions were recorded: a photography showing a person in a distress situation was associated to each sentence, the participants were asked to stand in that individuals shoes and to utter in an expressive manner.…”