Browsing by Person "Wolters, Maria"

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Designing a Spoken Dialogue Interface to an Intelligent Cognitive Assistant for People with Dementia
(Sage, 2015-08-14) Wolters, Maria; Kelly, Fiona; Kilgour, Jonathan
Intelligent cognitive assistants support people who need help performing everyday tasks by detecting when problems occur and providing tailored and context-sensitive assistance. Spoken dialogue interfaces allow users to interact with intelligent cognitive assistants while focusing on the task at hand. In order to establish requirements for voice interfaces to intelligent cognitive assistants, we conducted three focus groups with people with dementia, carers, and older people without a diagnosis of dementia. Analysis of the focus group data showed that voice and interaction style should be chosen based on the preferences of the user, not those of the carer. For people with dementia, the intelligent cognitive assistant should act like a patient,encouraging guide, while for older people without dementia, assistance should be to the point and not patronising. The intelligent cognitive assistant should be able to adapt to cognitive decline.
Making Speech Synthesis More Accessible to Older People.
(2007-08) Wolters, Maria; Campbell, Pauline; DePlacido, Christine; Liddell, Amy; Owens, David
In this paper, we report on an experiment that tested users' ability to understand the content of spoken auditory reminders. Users heard meeting reminders and medication reminders spoken in both a natural and a synthetic voice. Our results show that older users can understand synthetic speech as well as younger users provided that the prompt texts are well-designed, using familiar words and contextual cues. As soon as unfamiliar and complex words are introduced, users' hearing affects how well they can understand the synthetic voice, even if their hearing would pass common screening tests for speech synthesis experiments. Although hearing thresholds correlate best with users' performance, central auditory processing may also influence performance, especially when complex errors are made.
The effect of hearing loss on the intelligibility of synthetic speech
(2007-08) Wolters, Maria; Campbell, Pauline; DePlacido, Christine; Liddell, Amy; Owens, David; This research was funded by the EPSRC/BBSRC initiative SPARC and by the SFC grant MATCH (grant no. HR04016).
Many factors affect the intelligibility of synthetic speech. One aspect that has been severely neglected in past work is hearing loss. In this study, we investigate whether pure-tone audiometry thresholds across a wide range of frequencies (0.25-20kHz) are correlated with participants' performance on a simple task that involves accurately recalling and processing reminders. Participants' scores correlate not only with thresholds in the frequency ranges commonly associated with speech, but also with extended high-frequency thresholds.
The role of outer hair cell function in the perception of synthetic versus natural speech
(2007) Wolters, Maria; Campbell, Pauline; DePlacido, Christine; Liddell, Amy; Owens, David
Hearing loss as assessed by pure-tone audiometry (PTA) is significantly correlated with the intelligibility of synthetic speech. However, PTA is a subjective audiological measure that assesses the entire auditory pathway and does not discriminate between the different afferent and efferent contributions. In this paper, we focus on one particular aspect of hearing that has been shown to correlate with hearing loss: outer hair cell (OHC) function. One role of OHCs is to increase sensitivity and frequency selectivity. This function of OHCs can be assessed quickly and objectively through otoacoustic emissions (OAE) testing, which is little known outside the field of audiology. We find that OHC function affects the perception of human speech, but not that of synthetic speech. This has important implications not just for audiological and electrophysiological research, but also for adapting speech synthesis to ageing ears.