On the Development of a Phone Communication Aid for the Hearing Impaired

Abstract

We describe the use of Tangora - a large vocabulary, isolated word, speaker dependent automatic speech recognizer (ASR) - as a communication device that would allow a hearing impaired person to communicate over the telephone with hearing individuals. The usability of this system could be limited by the degradation in the Tangora's recognition accuracy if it is used over public telephone lines or ifit is used as a speaker independent system. In this paper we discuss some issues that could arise as a result of this. These include: How well can the hearing impaired cope with relatively low recognizer accuracy in phone conversation? How does the topic of conversation affect understanding of the meaning of spoken sentences? In particular, we have found that users can correctly understand the topic of ASR decoded phrases even when the recognizer accuracy is below 80%.