Body-Conducted Speech Recognition in Speech Support System for Disorders

People with speech disabilities face communication problems in daily conversation. They communicate with substitute speech, which is not used with enough frequency in daily conversation to be readily understood. Therefore, we have proposed the speech support system with body-conducted speech recognition. The system generates retrieval speech via a transfer function from body-conducted speech when the system uses recognition to decide on a subword sequence and duration time. We needed to examine the effectiveness of body-conducted speech recognition for disorders to construct the system. For the first step in constructing the system, we investigated continuous word unit speech recognition, which used an acoustic model that was not adapted to body-conducted speech for disorders. In this study, we analyzed each parameters of these speeches and experimented with body-conducted speech recognition. We concluded that an adaptation using body-conducted speech recognition to achieve high recognition performance for disorders is valid.