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Many recently published Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems produce audio close to real speech. However, TTS evaluation needs to be revisited to make sense of the results obtained with the new architectures, approaches and datasets. We propose…
Digit therapeutics are novel software devices that clinicians may utilize in delivering quality mental health care and ensuring positive outcomes. However, uptake of digital therapeutics and clinically tested software-based programs remains…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects more than 75 million people worldwide. However, scalable support for practicing everyday conversation is scarce: Low-cost activities such as story reading yield limited improvement. At the same time,…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often falter while processing stuttering-related disfluencies -- such as involuntary blocks and word repetitions -- yielding inaccurate transcripts. A critical barrier to progress is the scarcity…
This paper presents a description and evaluation of the ROC Speak system, a platform that allows ubiquitous access to communication skills training. ROC Speak (available at rocspeak.com) enables anyone to go to a website, record a video,…
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a fatal disease that not only affects movement, speech, and breath but also cognition. Recent studies have focused on the use of language analysis techniques to detect ALS and infer scales for monitoring…
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) severely impairs patients' ability to communicate, often leading to a decline in their quality of life within a few years of diagnosis. The P300 speller brain-computer interface (BCI) offers an…
Locked-in Syndrome patients are often misdiagnosed and face pessimistic prognosis because of similarities with disorders of consciousness, a lack of objective biomarkers and a difficult-to-recognize pathogenesis. Biomarkers show promise in…
Indonesia ranks fourth globally in the number of deaf cases. Individuals with hearing impairments often find communication challenging, necessitating the use of sign language. However, there are limited public services that offer such…
Speech intelligibility assessment is essential for evaluating neural speech codecs, yet most evaluation efforts focus on overall quality rather than intelligibility. Only a few publicly available tools exist for conducting standardized…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly improved large language model reasoning, but existing RL fine-tuning methods rely heavily on heuristic techniques such as entropy regularization and reweighting to maintain stability. In…
Voice assistants have become an essential tool for people with various disabilities because they enable complex phone- or tablet-based interactions without the need for fine-grained motor control, such as with touchscreens. However, these…
Silent speech interfaces (SSI) has been an exciting area of recent interest. In this paper, we present a non-invasive silent speech interface that uses inaudible acoustic signals to capture people's lip movements when they speak. We exploit…
End-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU) systems avoid an intermediate textual representation by mapping speech directly into intents with slot values. This approach requires considerable domain-specific training data. In…
Dyslexia is a common learning disorder that primarily impairs an individual's reading and writing abilities. In adults, dyslexia can affect both professional and personal lives, often leading to mental challenges and difficulties acquiring…
Dialogue technologies such as Amazon's Alexa have the potential to transform the healthcare industry. However, current systems are not yet naturally interactive: they are often turn-based, have naive end-of-turn detection and completely…
Conversational understanding is an integral part of modern intelligent devices. In a large fraction of the global traffic from customers using smart digital assistants, frictions in dialogues may be attributed to incorrect understanding of…
Millions of people live with cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Voice-enabled smart home systems offer promise for supporting daily living but rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe…
Many people with some form of hearing loss consider lipreading as their primary mode of day-to-day communication. However, finding resources to learn or improve one's lipreading skills can be challenging. This is further exacerbated in the…
Dysarthria is a neurological speech disorder that can significantly impact affected individuals' communication abilities and overall quality of life. The accurate and objective classification of dysarthria and the determination of its…