2018 Volume 64 Issue 4 Pages 121-129
"UD talk" is a software program aimed at supporting the communication between people with hearing disabilities and those without hearing problems, using automatic speech recognition. However, its accuracy in speech recognition is still not perfect. We utilized the "UD talk" software program to evaluate the speech intelligibility of dysarthria patients. A commercially available sample voice of dysarthria patients for training was dictated by the "UD talk" program and the percentage of how many words/phrases were recognizable by the software program was evaluated. The "UD talk" showed low recognition scores according to the severity of the dysarthria. The speech intelligibility index of the Japanese language matched between an expert speech-language-hearing therapist and the "UD talk" in 36/53 of the sample voices. However, the "UD talk" scored lower than the speech-language-hearing therapist did in 15/53 of the sample voices while the "UD talk" only showed better scores in 2/53 of the voices. These results indicated that "UD talk" can objectively evaluate the speech intelligibility in patients who had previously been exclusively evaluated subjectively by speech-language-hearing therapists.
