An experimental study of synthesized speech intelligibility usingtext created by telecommunication device for the deaf (TDD) users

摘要

An experiment that was conducted to assess the feasibility ofusing automatic text-to-speech translation in a message relay servicefor the deaf is described. Five conditions manipulated telecommunicationdevice for the deaf (TDD) text to create improvements that could beimplemented automatically. The manipulations included preprocessingchanges such as expanding abbreviations, use of an automatic spellingcorrector, and providing rules to users about how to generate morecomprehensible text. The results show that, overall, subjects understoodthe symbolic speech messages very well and that the text manipulationsresulted in improved performance. It is shown that a combined condition,which uses the preprocessing changes, the spelling corrections, and therules to users, resulted in the best performance. These results indicatethat speech synthesis can be a viable alternative to relay operatortranslation