Tracheoesophageal speech: A dedicated objective acoustic assessment

Drugman, Thomas; Rijckaert, Myriam; Janssens, Claire; Remacle, Marc

doi:10.1016/j.csl.2014.07.003

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Additionally, an OS voice quality assessment tool [37] was used as a guide to assess proficiency. This tool was based on the factors used in the A4S scale of [38] such as speaking rate, regularity, etc. We also considered accessibility of speakers as a factor, because their willingness and availability to come for follow-up recordings are useful for future research.…”

Section: Corpus and Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligibility and Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

et al. 2019

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Communication is a huge challenge for oesophageal speakers, be it for interactions with fellow humans or with digital voice assistants. We aim to quantify these communication challenges (both human-human and human-machine interactions) by measuring intelligibility and Listening Effort (LE) of Oesophageal Speech (OS) in comparison to Healthy Laryngeal Speech (HS). We conducted two listening tests (one web-based, the other in laboratory settings) to collect these measurements. Participants performed a sentence recognition and LE rating task in each test. Intelligibility, calculated as Word Error Rate, showed significant correlation with self-reported LE ratings. Speaker type (healthy or oesophageal) had a major effect on intelligibility and effort. More LE was reported for OS compared to HS even when OS intelligibility was close to HS. Listeners familiar with OS reported less effort when listening to OS compared to nonfamiliar listeners. However, such advantage of familiarity was not observed for intelligibility. Automatic speech recognition scores were higher for OS compared to HS.

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Section: Corpus and Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligibility and Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

et al. 2019

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“…Instead, the air is swallowed from the mouth and introduced in the oesophagus, being then expelled in a controlled way while producing the vibration. These huge differences in the production mechanisms lead to a diminution of naturalness and intelligibility [1,2,3]. As a consequence, the communication with others is hindered.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

LSTM based voice conversion for laryngectomees

Serrano¹,

Tavarez²,

Sarasola³

et al. 2018

IberSPEECH 2018

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This paper describes a voice conversion system designed with the aim of improving the intelligibility and pleasantness of oesophageal voices. Two different systems have been built, one to transform the spectral magnitude and another one for the fundamental frequency, both based on DNNs. Ahocoder has been used to extract the spectral information (mel cepstral coefficients) and a specific pitch extractor has been developed to calculate the fundamental frequency of the oesophageal voices. The cepstral coefficients are converted by means of an LSTM network. The conversion of the intonation curve is implemented through two different LSTM networks, one dedicated to the voiced unvoiced detection and another one for the prediction of F0 from the converted cepstral coefficients. The experiments described here involve conversion from one oesophageal speaker to a specific healthy voice. The intelligibility of the signals has been measured with a Kaldi based ASR system. A preference test has been implemented to evaluate the subjective preference of the obtained converted voices comparing them with the original oesophageal voice. The results show that spectral conversion improves ASR while restoring the intonation is preferred by human listeners.

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“…Additionally, an oesophageal voice quality assessment tool [18], based on the factors (speaking rate, regularity etc.) of the A4S scale of [19], was used as a guide to assess proficiency. Accessibility of speakers was considered because the opportunity to obtain follow-up recordings could be useful for future research.…”

Section: Selection Of Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to Laryngectomees: A study of Intelligibility and Self-reported Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

Raman¹,

Hernáez²,

Navas³

et al. 2018

IberSPEECH 2018

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Oesophageal speakers face a multitude of challenges, such as difficulty in basic everyday communication and inability to interact with digital voice assistants. We aim to quantify the difficulty involved in understanding oesophageal speech (in humanhuman and human-machine interactions) by measuring intelligibility and listening effort. We conducted a web-based listening test to collect these metrics. Participants were asked to transcribe and then rate the sentences for listening effort on a 5-point Likert scale. Intelligibility, calculated as Word Error Rate (WER), showed significant correlation with user rated effort. Speaker type (healthy or oesophageal) had a major effect on intelligibility and effort. Listeners familiar with oesophageal speech did not have any advantage over non familiar listeners in correctly understanding oesophageal speech. However, they reported lesser effort in listening to oesophageal speech compared to non familiar listeners. Additionally, we calculated speakerwise mean WERs and they were significantly lower when compared to an automatic speech recognition system.

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Tracheoesophageal speech: A dedicated objective acoustic assessment

Cited by 11 publications

References 37 publications

Intelligibility and Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

Intelligibility and Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

LSTM based voice conversion for laryngectomees

Listening to Laryngectomees: A study of Intelligibility and Self-reported Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

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