ISCA Archive Interspeech 2017
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2017

SIAK — A Game for Foreign Language Pronunciation Learning

Reima Karhila, Sari Ylinen, Seppo Enarvi, Kalle Palomäki, Aleksander Nikulin, Olli Rantula, Vertti Viitanen, Krupakar Dhinakaran, Anna-Riikka Smolander, Heini Kallio, Katja Junttila, Maria Uther, Perttu Hämäläinen, Mikko Kurimo

We introduce a digital game for children’s foreign-language learning that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) for evaluating children’s utterances. Our first prototype focuses on the learning of English words and their pronunciation. The game connects to a network server, which handles the recognition and pronunciation grading of children’s foreign-language speech. The server is reusable for different applications. Given suitable acoustic models, it can be used for grading pronunciations in any language.