A study is presented on how well objective measures of speech quality and intelligibility can predict the subjective intelligibility of speech that has undergone spectral envelope smoothing and simplification of its excitation. Speech modifications are made by resynthesising speech that has been spectrally smoothed. Objective measures are applied to the modified speech and include measures of s...

Background: the reduction in speech intelligibility is considered one of the main characteristics of individuals with speech disorders, and is an important issue for clinical and research investigation. In spite of its relevance, the literature does not present a consensus on how to measure speech intelligibility. Besides the diversity of existent methods, another important issue refers to the ...

A speech pre-processing algorithm is presented that improves the speech intelligibility in noise for the near-end listener. The algorithm improves intelligibility by optimally redistributing the speech energy over time and frequency according to a perceptual distortion measure, which is based on a spectro-temporal auditory model. Since this auditory model takes into account shorttime informatio...

Recent literature indicates increasing interest in deep neural networks for use in speech enhancement systems. Currently, these systems are mostly evaluated through objective measures of speech quality and/or intelligibility. Subjective intelligibility evaluations of these systems have so far not been reported. In this paper we report the results of a speech recognition test with 15 participant...

Most current techniques for near-end speech intelligibility enhancement have focused on processing clean input signals, however, in realistic environments, the input is often noisy. Processing noisy speech for intelligibility enhancement using algorithms developed for clean signals can lower the perceptual quality of the samples when they are listened in quiet. Here we address the quality loss ...

In mobile devices, perceived speech signal degrades significantly in the presence of background noise as it reaches directly at the listener's ears. There is a need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by incorporating speech enhancement algorithms. This paper focuses on speech enhancement method including auditory masking propertie...

In mobile devices, perceived speech signal degrades significantly in the presence of background noise as it reaches directly at the listener's ears. There is a need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by incorporating speech enhancement algorithms. This paper focuses on speech enhancement method including auditory masking propertie...

In adverse listening conditions, talkers can increase their intelligibility by speaking clearly [Picheny, M.A., et al. (1985). J. Speech Hear. Res. 28, 96-103; Payton, K. L., et al. (1994). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 1581-1592]. This modified speaking style, known as clear speech, is typically spoken more slowly than conversational speech [Picheny, M. A., et al. (1986). J. Speech Hear. Res. 29, 43...

Speech therapy aiming at improving voice quality and speech intelligibility is often hampered by the lack of knowledge of the underlying deficits. One way to help speech therapists treating patients would be to supply synthetic benchmarks for pathological speech. These can be used to train therapists and evaluate and interpret automatic speech recognizers used for diagnosing pathological speech...

Objective assessment of synthetic speech intelligibility can be a useful tool for the development of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, as it provides a reproducible and inexpensive alternative to subjective listening tests. In a recent work, it was shown that the intelligibility of synthetic speech could be assessed objectively by comparing two sequences of phoneme class conditional probabilities, ...