"Nobody Speaks that Fast!" An Empirical Study of Speech Rate in Conversational Agents for People with Vision Impairments

Author(s):  
Dasom Choi ◽  
Daehyun Kwak ◽  
Minji Cho ◽  
Sangsu Lee
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Danielle Bragg ◽  
Katharina Reinecke ◽  
Richard E. Ladner

As conversational agents and digital assistants become increasingly pervasive, understanding their synthetic speech becomes increasingly important. Simultaneously, speech synthesis is becoming more sophisticated and manipulable, providing the opportunity to optimize speech rate to save users time. However, little is known about people’s abilities to understand fast speech. In this work, we provide an extension of the first large-scale study on human listening rates, enlarging the prior study run with 453 participants to 1,409 participants and adding new analyses on this larger group. Run on LabintheWild, it used volunteer participants, was screen reader accessible, and measured listening rate by accuracy at answering questions spoken by a screen reader at various rates. Our results show that people who are visually impaired, who often rely on audio cues and access text aurally, generally have higher listening rates than sighted people. The findings also suggest a need to expand the range of rates available on personal devices. These results demonstrate the potential for users to learn to listen to faster rates, expanding the possibilities for human-conversational agent interaction.


Interpreting ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-237
Author(s):  
Chao Han ◽  
Sijia Chen ◽  
Rongbo Fu ◽  
Qin Fan

Abstract Fluency is an important, yet insufficiently understood, construct in interpreting studies. This article reports on an empirical study which explored the relationship between utterance fluency measures and raters’ perceived fluency ratings of English/Chinese consecutive interpreting. It also examined whether such relationship was consistent across interpreting directions and rater types. The results partially supported the categorization of utterance fluency into breakdown, speed and repair fluency. It was also found that mean length of unfilled pauses, phonation time ratio, mean length of run and speech rate had fairly strong correlations with perceived fluency ratings in both interpreting directions and across rater types. Among a number of competing regression models that were built to predict raters’ fluency ratings, a parsimonious model, using mean length of unfilled pauses and mean length of run as predictors, accounted for about 60% of the variance of fluency ratings in both directions and across rater types. These results are expected to help create, rewrite and modify rubrics and scalar descriptors of fluency scales in rater-mediated interpretation assessment and to inform automated scoring of fluency in interpreting.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 1081-1092 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal Ponathil ◽  
Firat Ozkan ◽  
Brandon Welch ◽  
Jeffrey Bertrand ◽  
Kapil Chalil Madathil

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Tsiamtsiouris ◽  
Kim Krieger

Abstract The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that adults who stutter will exhibit significant improvements after attending a residential, 3-week intensive program that focuses on avoidance reduction and stuttering modification therapy. Preliminary analyses focused on four measures: (a) SSI-3, (b) speech rate, (c) S-24 Scale, and (d) OASES. Results indicated significant improvements on all of the measures.


1996 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie R. Wanberg ◽  
John D. Watt ◽  
Deborah J. Rumsey

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