Towards Non-intrusive Speech Quality Assessment for Modern Telecommunications

In a competitive telecommunication market where price differentials have been minimized, quality of service (QoS) has become very important. Speech quality is a major dimension of perceived QoS, and the ability to monitor and design for this quality is a top priority. Traditionally, the perceived quality of speech has been measured by expensive and time-consuming subjective listening tests. Over the last decade, numerous attempts have been made to supplement subjective tests with objective estimators of perceived speech quality. This paper presents issues involved in modern objective speech quality assessment systems, in regard to their practicality, efficiency and accuracy. It also identifies the necessity for a non-intrusive, output-only based technique, and outlines some new ideas that could be utilised to develop an assessment method that uses only the output or the degraded speech signal.