Measuring speech quality impact on tasks performance

This paper deals with perceptual test methodologies to assess speech quality of telecommunication systems. Faced with the tremendous evolution in the telecommunications industry and with drawbacks of typical methodologies recommended by ITU-T, a new way to assess speech quality is investigated. It consists in measuring performance (i.e. reaction times and error rates) when subjects are performing two overlapped tasks involving degraded speech signals. This paper presents three tests based on theses two tasks. These tests are different in their protocols. Since results depends on the considered protocol, they are compared to define the most sensitive protocol to quality effect on performance.