Automatic Evaluation of Tracheoesophageal Substitute Voices, ser. Studien zur Mustererkennung

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is a possibility to restore the ability to speak after laryngectomy, i.e. after the removal of the larynx. TE speech often shows low audibility and intelligibility which makes it a challenge for the patients to communicate. In speech rehabilitation the patient's voice quality has to be evalu-ated. As no objective classication means exists until now and an automation of this procedure is desirable, we performed ini-tial experiments for automatic evaluation using prosodic fea-tures. Our reference were scoring results for several evaluation criteria for TE speech from ve experienced raters. Correlation coefcients of up to 0.84 between human and automatic rating are promising for future work. 1