On the impact of dysarthric speech on contemporary ASR cloud platforms

The spread of voice-driven devices has a positive impact for people with disabilities in smart environments, since such devices allow them to perform a series of daily activities that were difficult or impossible before. As a result, their quality of life and autonomy increase. However, the speech recognition technology employed in such devices becomes limited with people having communication disorders, like dysarthria. People with dysarthria may be unable to control their smart environments, at least with the needed proficiency; this problem may negatively affect the perceived reliability of the entire environment. By exploiting the TORGO database of speech samples pronounced by people with dysarthria, this paper compares the accuracy of the dysarthric speech recognition as achieved by three speech recognition cloud platforms, namely IBM Watson Speech-to-Text, Google Cloud Speech, and Microsoft Azure Bing Speech. Such services, indeed, are used in many virtual assistants deployed in smart environments, such as Google Home. The goal is to investigate whether such cloud platforms are usable to recognize dysarthric speech, and to understand which of them is the most suitable for people with dysarthria. Results suggest that the three platforms have comparable performance in recognizing dysarthric speech and that the accuracy of the recognition is related to the speech intelligibility of the person. Overall, the platforms are limited when the dysarthric speech intelligibility is low (80–90% of word error rate), while they improve up to reach a word error rate of 15–25% for people without abnormality in their speech intelligibility. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.