A control-theoretic model of speech production and recognition for use within prosthetic communication devices

在北美，数百万人患有某种语言障碍。他们中的许多人有正常的心智能力，能够处理语言，但他们缺乏对语言中使用的肌肉（如嘴唇和舌头）的正常控制，导致语言非常困难甚至不可能理解。其他人有认知障碍（例如，由阿尔茨海默氏病引起的），难以理解正在说的话，记住正确的单词或说出句子。 我正在建立一个新的实验室，名为SPOClab，其目的是生产软件，以帮助残疾人沟通。我们的目标是改进语音识别的核心技术，并在帮助人们日常生活的应用程序中使用该技术。改善语音和语言障碍患者的语音识别将从根本上改变目前语音识别的方式，因为现代语音识别根本无法正常工作。我们进行语音识别的新方法将包括教计算机理解语音是如何产生的。例如，如果计算机知道说话者试图闭上嘴唇，它就更容易区分“map”中的“m”音和“nap”中的“n”音。 SPOClab开发的高级语音识别将用于帮助人们进行交流。例如，我们将把难以理解的语音信号转换为人类听众更容易理解的信号，我们将使用视频作为计算机应用程序的输入模式。这项技术可以对许多加拿大人产生巨大的积极影响，包括那些随着年龄增长而丧失语言能力的加拿大人。

Millions of people in North America have some sort of speech disorder. Many of these have normal mental abilities and are able to process language, but they lack normal control over the muscles used in speech (such as the lips and tongue), resulting in speech that can be very difficult or even impossible to understand. Other individuals have cognitive disorders (for example, caused by Alzheimer's disease) where it becomes difficult to understand what is being said, to remember the right words, or to produce sentences. I am starting a new lab called SPOClab whose purpose is to produce software to help people with disabilities communicate. Our goal is to improve the core technology in speech recognition and to use that technology within applications that help people in their daily lives. Improving speech recognition for individuals with speech and language disorders will involve fundamentally changing the way speech recognition is done currently, because modern speech recognition simply doesn't work properly for very different kinds of speech. Our new way of doing speech recognition will involve teaching the computer to understand how speech is physically produced. For example, if the computer knows that the speaker tried to close their lips, it becomes easier to tell the 'm' sound in 'map' apart from the 'n' sound in 'nap'. The advanced speech recognition developed in SPOClab will be used to help people communicate. For example, we will transform hard-to-understand speech signals to be more intelligible to human listeners and we will use video as a mode of input to computer applications. This technology can have a tremendous positive impact for many Canadians, including those Canadians for whom a loss of linguistic abilities accompanies ageing.