Improving dysarthric speech intelligibility through re-synthesized and grafted units

In this paper, an assistive speech-enabled system is proposed to help dysarthric speakers. This system aims at improving the intelligibility of dysarthric speech making it as natural as possible and close to the original voice of the dysarthric speaker. The resynthesized utterances use new basic units, a new concatenating algorithm and a grafting technique to correct the bad pronounced phonemes. The Nemours database is used to evaluate the proposed assistive communication system. The results of subjective evaluations show that the proposed technique reaches the very satisfactory MOS (mean opinion score) of 4.