Designing Support System for Speech Disorders Correction Exercises

Cluttering is a widespread speech disorder, usually occurring along with stuttering and influencing many aspects of people’s life. Cluttering symptoms, among others, include actual and perceived increased rate of speech, which negatively affects speaker’s speech intelligibility and might as well cause discomfort to other people involved in a conversation. Treatment of cluttering is partly aimed at speech rate control, which is addressed with multiple practices developed over the years of research. Despite this disorder being infamous for easy and often occurring relapse and difficult generalization of the skills gained during speech pathology treatment sessions, very little research is focused on helping people who clutter (PWC) to transfer new skills into real life scenarios. Thus, we designed a generic information system that would help PWC control their speech rate in real life scenarios in real-time and conducted a social acceptability survey of one possible implementation of such a system. We then implemented a prototype of an automatic real-time speech-rate estimation system with control feedback via a Telegram bot. User studies results suggest that our system is helpful for speech rate control.