limitations
Assessing speech intelligibility is a critical component in the assessment of communication efficacy2. In traditional evaluation the speaker remains the most influencing factor because people could judge by ”feeling”.7-10 In contrast, ASR system calculations are based on the input voice information without being affected by other factors. Despite this limitation, the results of the ASR system were highly consistent with those of the traditional evaluation.
The limitation of ASR is that the evaluation score is too low when the given speech is less intelligible. In most cases, the ASR score is lower than the traditional assessment score. It does not mean that ASR assessment does not show the true level of the child; on the contrary, the ASR assessment is more sensitive to nonstandard pronunciation from children because it can truly reflect the current speech level of the children. However, it should be noted that different ASR software programs and different versions might also affect the results, causing a certain impact because of different internal dictionary systems.
Clinical applicability
We believe that the clinical intelligibility of children with hearing loss can be evaluated using the ASR system. Further research is in progress to enhance the possibilities of different versions of automatic speech recognition, as it can also be of special interest as application in a medical field. In addition, the ASR system can also try to assess the articulation intelligibility of Mandarin-speaking children, such as cleft lip and palate, dysarthria, childhood apraxia of speech and aphasia. It can also further complete the intelligence of diagnosis and directly match the recognition result with the correct answer to obtain the final score.