The Teleface project - disability, feasibility and intelligibility

The Teleface project, a project that aims at evaluating the possibilities for a telephone communication aid for the hard of hearing, is presented as well as the different parts of the project: audio-visual speech synthesis, visual speech measurement and multimodal speech intelligibility studies. Some results from the first test series are presented. Introduction It is well known that visual information obtained by speechreading and interpretation of body gestures improves perception of speech, and especially so in a noisy environment. Sumby & Pollack (1954) has described the amount of visual information from lip-reading as a function of the signal to noise level. The visual information is even more important to persons with a hearing loss. The Teleface project at KTH focuses on the usage of multimodal speech technology for hearing impaired people. The first phase of the project aims at evaluating the increased intelligibility hearing impaired people might experience from an auditory ..