ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2006

Evaluation of tracheoesophageal substitute voices using prosodic features

Tino Haderlein, Elmar Nöth, Maria Schuster, Ulrich Eysholdt, Frank Rosanowski

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is a possibility to restore the ability to speak after laryngectomy, i.e. after the removal of the larynx. TE speech often shows low audibility and intelligibility which makes it a challenge for the patients to communicate. In speech rehabilitation the patient's voice quality has to be evaluated. As no objective classification means exists until now and an automation of this procedure is desirable, we performed initial experiments for automatic evaluation using prosodic features. Our reference were scoring results for several evaluation criteria for TE speech from five experienced raters. Correlation coefficients of up to 0.84 between human and automatic rating are promising for future work.