Influence of expressive speech on ASR performances: Application to elderly assistance in smart home

Abstract

Smart homes are discussed as a win-win solution for maintaining the Elderly at home as a better alternative to care homes for dependent elderly people. Such Smart homes are characterized by rich domestic commands devoted to elderly safety and comfort. The vocal command has been identified as an efficient, well accepted, interaction way, it can be directly addressed to the “habitat”, or through a robotic interface. In daily use, the challenges of vocal commands recognition are the noisy environment but moreover the reformulation and the expressive change of the strictly authorized commands. This paper focuses (1) to show, on the base of elicited corpus, that expressive speech, in particular distress speech, strongly affects generic state of the art ASR systems (20 to 30 %) (2) how interesting improvement thanks to ASR adaptation can regulate (15 %) this degradation. We conclude on the necessary adaptation of ASR system to expressive speech when they are designed for person’s assistance.