Speech-Based Human and Service Robot Interaction: An Application for Mexican Dysarthric People

Abstract

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder due to weakness or poor coordination of the speech muscles. This condition can be caused by a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or by a degenerative neurological disease. Commonly, people with this disorder also have muscular dystrophy, which restricts their use of switches or keyboards for communication or control of assistive devices (i.e., an electric wheelchair or a service robot). In this case, speech recognition is an attractive alternative for interaction and control of service robots, despite the difficulty of achieving robust recognition performance. In this paper we present a speech recognition system for human and service robot interaction for Mexican Spanish dysarthric speakers. The core of the system consisted of a Speaker Adaptive (SA) recognition system trained with normal-speech. Features such as on-line control of the language model perplexity and the adding of vocabulary, contribute to high recognition performance. Others, such as assessment and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, contribute to a more complete interaction with a service robot. Live tests were performed with two mild dysarthric speakers, achieving recognition accuracies of 90-95% for spontaneous speech and 95-100% of accomplished simulated service robot tasks.

Point-and-Command Paradigm for Interaction with Assistive Robots

“…There is a variety of ways to interact with a mobile robot, but we think that gesture and speech channels are the most suitable, a conclusion that it supported by other authors too (for instance, [12] and [13]).…”

RAMSES : a robotic assistant and a mobile support environment for speech and language therapy

“…The results reveal very similar outcomes in the children responses for both cases (amount of words, filler words and key words). Other approaches propose the use of robots to support therapy sessions and improve the social interaction skill in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders [7], [8], motivate children with communication disorders to learn the sign language [9] or provide support for Mexican patients suffering from motor speech disorders (dysarthria) [10].…”

SPELTRA: A Robotic Assistant for Speech-and-Language Therapy

“…The results reveal very similar outcomes in the children responses for both cases (number of words, filler words and key words). Other approaches propose the use of robots to support therapy sessions and improve the social interaction skill in children with autism spectrum disorders [7,8], motivate children with communication disorders to learn the sign language [9] or provide support for Mexican patients suffering from motor speech disorders (dysarthria) [10].…”