Variable Voice Likability Affecting Subjective Speech Quality Assessments

In telephone conversations, transmitted speech of good to excellent quality is desired for enhanced Quality of Experience and to sustain lasting customer loyalty. Subjective mean opinion scores account for perceived transmitted quality, while instrumental models, such as POLQA, are able to estimate the subjective judgments. To perform subjective...

Predicting automatic speech recognition performance over communication channels from instrumental speech quality and intelligibility scores

The performance of automatic speech recognition based on coded-decoded speech heavily depends on the quality of the transmitted signals, determined by channel impairments. This paper examines relationships between speech recognition performance and measurements of speech quality and intelligibility over transmission channels. Different to...

Evaluating spoken dialogue systems according to de-facto standards: A case study

In the present paper, we investigate the validity and reliability of de-facto evaluation standards, defined for measuring or predicting the quality of the interaction with spoken dialogue systems. Two experiments have been carried out with a dialogue system for controlling domestic devices. During these experiments, subjective judgments of...

Evaluating the speech output component of a smart-home system

This paper describes four experiments which have been carried out to evaluate the speech output component of the INSPIRE spoken dialogue system, providing speech control for di.erent devices located in a ‘‘smart’’ home environment. The aim is to quantify the impact of different factors on the quality of the system, when addressed either in the...

Evaluation of the Speech Output of a Smart-Home System in a Car Environment

This paper reports on the evaluation of the speech output component of a dialogue system that enables the control of different home appliances via speech. It was simulated that participants called the system from the car and listened to feedback messages from the system. Their task was to judgethe quality of the system’s output while performing...

Evaluating System Metaphors via the Speech Output of a Smart Home System

This paper presents an evaluation of the speech output component of a smart home system developed under the European INSPIRE project. In particular, it is investigated how the 'personality' of the system which is conveyed by the output speech is accepted by the user. Three different metaphors are compared: An assistant visualized by a talking...

INSPIRE: Evaluation of a Smart-Home System for Infotainment Management and Device Control

This paper gives an overview of the assessment and evaluation methods which have been used to determine the quality of the INSPIRE smart home system. The system allows different home appliances to be controlled via speech, and consists of speech and speaker recognition, speech understanding, dialogue management, and speech output components. The...