Automated Objective Speech Intelligibility Assessment System

Based on the success of our Phase I feasibility research, we propose to continue the project for the automated objective speech intelligibility assessment system. It consists of a pair of head and torso simulators placed at the same distance as typical face-to-face communication, a power amplifier, a laptop computer, a speech recognizer, and console software. The simulator has acoustic properties similar to those of a human and can wear any kinds of masks that need to be tested. The speech intelligibility is represented as a score associated with automatic speech recognition accuracy. Special techniques are proposed to construct robots as the simulator and to ensure results of the automatic assessment is similar to human subject assessment.