Towards graceful turn management in human-agent interaction for people with cognitive impairments

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. Towards graceful turn management in human-agent interaction for people with cognitive impairments. In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2016). 2016: 26-31

flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for problem-aware, incremental spoken interaction for all user groups (demo paper)

Yaghoubzadeh R, Kopp S. flexdiam – flexible dialogue management for problem-aware, incremental spoken interaction for all user groups (demo paper). In: Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2016). 2016: 87-90

Assistive Technologies

A special place into assistive technologies is taken up by the speech recognition and speech synthesizer, which can be used by many different users, persons with visual, language or mobility disabilities. For many years soft developers have been concerned by speech recognition and text-to-speech because we assist to great changes in informatics area and accessibility is the main condition in the creation of assistive software applications.speech recognition, text-to-speech, assistive technologies, accessibility

Increase Apparent Public Speaking Fluency By Speech Augmentation

Fluent and confident speech is desirable to every speaker. But professional speech delivering requires a great deal of experience and practice. In this paper, we propose a speech stream manipulation system which can help non-professional speakers to produce fluent, professional-like speech content, in turn contributing towards better listener engagement and comprehension. We propose to achieve this task by manipulating the disfluencies in human speech, like the sounds 'uh' and 'um', the filler words and awkward long silences. Given any unrehearsed speech we segment and silence the filled pauses and doctor the duration of imposed silence as well as other long pauses ('disfluent') by a predictive model learned using professional speech dataset. Finally, we output a audio stream in which speaker sounds more fluent, confident and practiced compared to the original speech he/she recorded. According to our quantitative evaluation, we significantly increase the fluency of speech by reducing rate of pauses and fillers

Use of an agile bridge in the development of assistive technology

Engaging with end users in the development of assistive technologies remains one of the major challenges for researchers and developers in the field of accessibility and HCI. Developing usable software systems for people with complex disabilities is problematic, software developers are wary of using user-centred design, one of the main methods by which usability can be improved, due to concerns about how best to work with adults with complex disabilities, in particular Severe Speech and Physical Impairments (SSPI) and how to involve them in research. This paper reports on how the adoption of an adapted agile approach involving the incorporation of a user advocate on the research team helped in meeting this challenge in one software project and offers suggestions for how this could be used by other development teams

Integrating user-centred design in the development of a silent speech interface based on permanent magnetic articulography

Abstract: A new wearable silent speech interface (SSI) based on Permanent Magnetic Articulography (PMA) was developed with the involvement of end users in the design process. Hence, desirable features such as appearance, port-ability, ease of use and light weight were integrated into the prototype. The aim of this paper is to address the challenges faced and the design considerations addressed during the development. Evaluation on both hardware and speech recognition performances are presented here. The new prototype shows a com-parable performance with its predecessor in terms of speech recognition accuracy (i.e. ~95% of word accuracy and ~75% of sequence accuracy), but significantly improved appearance, portability and hardware features in terms of min-iaturization and cost