Non-verbal Sound Detection for Disordered Speech
AuthorsColin Lea, Zifang Huang, Dhruv Jain, Lauren Tooley, Zeinab Liaghat, Shrinath Thelapurath, Leah Findlater, Jeffrey P. Bigham
AuthorsColin Lea, Zifang Huang, Dhruv Jain, Lauren Tooley, Zeinab Liaghat, Shrinath Thelapurath, Leah Findlater, Jeffrey P. Bigham
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.
A voice replicator is a powerful tool for people at risk of losing their ability to speak, including those with a recent diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or other conditions that can progressively impact speaking ability. First introduced in May 2023 and made available on iOS 17 in September 2023, Personal Voice is a tool that creates a synthesized voice for such users to speak in FaceTime, phone calls, assistive communication apps, and in-person conversations.