The Effect of Three Variables on Synthetic Speech Intelligibility in Noisy Environments

Abstract

Military Command and Control (C2) requires easy access to information needed for the commander's situation assessment and direction of troops. Providing this information via synthetic speech is a viable alternative, but additional information is required before speech systems can be implemented for C2 functions. An experiment was conducted to study several factors which may affect the intelligibility of synthetic speech. The factors examined were: (1) speech rate; (2) synthetic speech messages presented at lower, the same, and higher frequencies than background noise frequency; (3) voice richness; and (4) interactions between speech rate, voice fundamental frequency, and voice richness. Response latency and recognition accuracy were measured. Results clearly indicate that increasing speech rate leads to an increase latency and a decrease in recognition accuracy, at least for the novice user. No effect of voice fundamental frequency or richness was demonstrated.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA226610

Entities

People

  • Joyce C. Munlin

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Sensors
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Airborne Warning And Control System
  • Aircrafts
  • Analysis Of Variance
  • Background Noise
  • Command And Control
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Data Analysis
  • Experimental Design
  • Frequency
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Measurement
  • Military Aircraft
  • Recognition
  • Speech

Readers

  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Wetland-Land-Environmental Management.

Technology Areas

  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control