Posts Tagged Parkinson’s disease

Disordered speech and voice may limit access to everyday voice activated devices (e.g., mobile phones, computers). These devices have automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that have been trained on non-disordered speech. This makes it frustrating for individuals with speech disorders such as those accompanying Amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Down Syndrome and Parkinson’s disease (PD) to utilize these devices. Project Euphonia is an initiative by Google to make speech technology more accessible to individuals with non-standard speech. The first step in this process is to gather large numbers of speech samples from disordered speakers in order to train speech recognition systems. This paper reports initial work to collect speech data from individuals with PD to contribute to this project.