Paper Info
Title
Assessing Virtual Assistant Capabilities with Italian Dysarthric Speech.
Abstract
The usage of smartphone-based virtual assistants (e.g., Siri or Google Assistant) is growing, and their spread has generally a positive impact on device accessibility, e.g., for people with disabilities. However, people with dysarthria or other speech impairments may be unable to use these virtual assistants with proficiency. This paper investigates to which extent people with ALS-induced dysarthria can be understood and get consistent answers by three widely used smartphone-based assistants, namely Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana. We focus on the recognition of Italian dysarthric speech, to study the behavior of the virtual assistants with this specific population for which no relevant studies are available. We collected and recorded suitable speech samples from people with dysarthria in a dedicated center of the Molinette hospital, in Turin, Italy. Starting from those recordings, the differences between such assistants, in terms of speech recognition and consistency in answer, are investigated and discussed. Results highlight different performance among the virtual assistants. For speech recognition, Google Assistant is the most promising, with around 25% of word error rate per sentence. Consistency in answer, instead, sees Siri and Google Assistant provide coherent answers around 60% of times.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3234695.3236354
ASSETS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Automatic Speech Recognition,Conversational Assistant,Dysarthria,Speech Impairment,Accessibility
Dysarthric speech,Population,Remote assistance,Computer science,Word error rate,Speech recognition,Human–computer interaction,Sentence,Dysarthria
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5650-3
0
0.34
References 
Authors
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fabio Ballati100.34
F. Corno260255.65
Luigi De Russis39226.25