Elderly perception of speech from a computer

Abstract

An aging population still needs to access information, such as bus schedules. It is evident that they will be doing so using computers and especially interfaces using speech input and output. This is a preliminary study to the use of synthetic speech for the elderly. In it twenty persons between the ages of 60 and 80 were asked to listen to speech emitted by a robot (CMU’s VIKIA) and to write down what they heard. All of the speech was natural prerecorded speech (not synthetic) read by one female speaker. There were four listening conditions: (a) only speech emitted, (b) robot moves before emitting speech, (c) face has lip movement during speech, (d) both (b) and (c). There were very few errors for conditions (b), (c), and (d), but errors existed for condition (a). The presentation will discuss experimental conditions, show actual figures and try to draw conclusions for speech communication between computers and the elderly.