Dysarthric vocal interfaces with minimal training data

Over the past decade, several speech-based electronic assistive technologies (EATs) have been developed that target users with dysarthric speech. These EATs include vocal command & control systems, but also voice-input voice-output communication aids (VIVOCAs). In these systems, the vocal interfaces are based on automatic speech recognition systems (ASR), but this approach requires much training data and detailed annotation. In this work we evaluate an alternative approach, which works by mining utterance-based representations of speech for recurrent acoustic patterns, with the goal of achieving usable recognition accuracies with less speaker-specific training data. Comparisons with a conventional ASR system on dysarthric speech databases show that the proposed approach offers a substantial reduction in the amount of training data needed to achieve the same recognition accuracies.