18/05/2025
Upcoming Webinar Announcement:
We are pleased to invite you to the 19th webinar in our series, titled:
"Speech Assessments: An Overview"
Speaker:
Dr. Sneha Raman
Research Scientist
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Date: 24th May 2025
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM (IST)
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/vf89s61cYzp1iU8o6
Deadline of Registration: 23rd May 2025 (4:00 PM)
Join us for an insightful session where Dr. Sneha Raman will provide an overview of various approaches and methodologies in speech assessment, their applications, and emerging research directions.
Abstract of the webinar:
The intent of producing speech is varied – communicating with loved ones and strangers, interacting with service providers, reading aloud, public discourse, teaching and so on. In many scenarios, the produced speech is not intelligible or natural sounding, such as with non-native speech, disordered speech, children’s speech or TTS outputs. On the other hand, speech is perceived to be unintelligible or unnatural by hearing impaired individuals and in noisy environments. The speech science community, whether it is speech scientists, speech pathologists or machine learning experts, put in a lot of effort in making speech easier to comprehend and listen to, via interventions, speech enhancement algorithms and other methods. One common need in all these fields of research is to conduct appropriate, effective, accurate, use-case centric speech assessment methods.
Is a speech sample good enough for a normal hearing listener? Will it be understood by a hearing-impaired listener? How much has a non-native speaker improved after going for diction classes for three months? Is a child reading better at the end of the academic year compared to the start? All these are questions that can be answered by various speech assessment methods. In this talk I will give an overview of the several speech assessment techniques used today, from Likert scales to measures from brain signals. Then I will focus on two applications that I have worked on – disordered speech and oral reading fluency - where speech assessment is at the centrestage.
