The SpeechMaster Software Package - Aspects of Linguistics and Informatics

Dénes Paczolay , András Kocsor, Györgyi Sejtes, Gábor Hégely

The “SpeechMaster” package seeks to apply speech recognition technology to speech therapy and the teaching of reading. The role of speech recognition is to provide visual phonetic feedback. In the first case it is intended to replace the missing auditive feedback of the hearing impaired, while in the latter case it is to reinforce the ‘correct’ association between the phoneme-grapheme pairs. With the aid of a computer, children can practice without the need for the continuous presence of the teacher. Both applications – teaching reading and speech impediment therapy – require a real-time response from the system in the form of an easily comprehensible visual feedback. With the simplest display setting visual feedback is provided by means of flickering letters, their identity and brightness being adjusted to the speech recognizer's output. The project consists of two main parts: a research part and an application part. The research part is devoted to investigating modern machine learning techniques which can be used in the development of numerous info-communication systems. The machine learning algorithms developed have been made available as open-source software and we hope that they will stimulate the development of systems that requires these kinds of modules. One such example is speech recognition, which is the heart of the “SpeechMaster” program, developed in the second part of our project. Informaticians, surdopedagogues, developer pedagogues, linguists and a graphic designer work in a team to replace the inconvenient “mirror method” and to help children to associate phonemes with graphemes. The software’s database with its sound files, recording data, etc. can be used in further informatician an linguistic research. It is important for us that we will make the program freely available on the Internet. The methodology based on our daily work is also available in an appendix. We hope that the software product will help many school-children with learning to read and that teachers will find it useful in giving different tasks to different children with a tool that allows the conscious planning of individual work.