Subjective and objective assessment of full bandwidth speech quality

With the introduction of fullband speech coding the question arises what role frequency components above 14 kHz play in speech quality assessment. On the one hand, our results show that bandwidth limitation from 24 kHz down to 14 kHz is not audible to even the most critical subject. On the other hand, 14-24 kHz band limited, audible levels of...

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...

The impact of tone language and non-native language listening on measuring speech quality

The extent to which the modeling used in objective speech quality algorithms depends on the cultural background of listeners as well as on the language characteristics using American English and Igbo, an African tone language is investigated. Two different approaches were used in order to separate behavioral aspects from speech signal aspects....

Degradation decomposition of the perceived quality of speech signals on the basis of a perceptual modeling approach

The authors discuss the way we perceive the quality of a speech signal and how different degradations contribute to the overall perceived speech (listening) quality. More specifically, ITU-T Recommendation P.862 (perceptual evaluation of speech quality-PESQ), which provides a perceptual modeling approach with which the subjectively perceived...

Objective assessment of speech and audio quality - Technology and applications

In the past few years, objective quality assessment models have become increasingly used for assessing or monitoring speech and audio quality. By measuring perceived quality on an easily-understood subjective scale, such as listening quality (excellent, good, fair, poor, bad), these methods provide a quick and repeatable way to estimate customer...

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...

Speech intelligibility and speech quality of a MELP speech coder in combination with a noise pre-processing system [Spraakverstaanbaarheid en spraakkwaliteit van een MELP-spraakcodeersysteem in combinatie met een ruisonderdrukkend systeem]

The speech intelligibility and quality of a MELP low bitrate speech coder (1200 bps) were investigated in an experiment, in which the speech coder was either combined with or without a noise pre-processing system. The central question to be addressed was to what extent the performance of the speech coder could be improved by adding a noise pre...