Existing measures of speech intelligibility and speech quality can be ineffective for evaluating new types of speech communication systems, such as wideband audio codecs, digital hearing aids and noise-reduction systems. We propose that new performance-based evaluation methods are required which tap into the cognitive effort listeners employ to understand speech through such systems. We present an example of such a method, based on the correction of transcripts of fluent spontaneous dialogues, and evaluate it for six different signal qualities, including telephone, added noise and noise-reduced conditions. We show that signal quality has a significant effect both in terms of transcript error detection accuracy and in terms of processing speed. We also show that in this test noise-reduction did not have any beneficial effect, despite the commonly recorded opinion that noise reduction improves signal quality.
Cite as: Huckvale, M., Hilkhuysen, G., Frasi, D. (2010) Performance-Based Measurement of Speech Quality with an Audio Proof-Reading Task. Proc. 3rd International Workshop on Perceptual Quality of Systems (PQS 2010), 77-82, doi: 10.21437/PQS.2010-14
@inproceedings{huckvale10_pqs,
author={Mark Huckvale and Gaston Hilkhuysen and Deizom Frasi},
title={{Performance-Based Measurement of Speech Quality with an Audio Proof-Reading Task}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. 3rd International Workshop on Perceptual Quality of Systems (PQS 2010)},
pages={77--82},
doi={10.21437/PQS.2010-14}
}