VOIS: The First Speech Therapy App Specifically Designed for Myanmar Hearing-Impaired Children

Abstract

The hearing-impaired children's education is challenging because they are unlikely to develop normal speech and language ability. We propose a mobile application VOIS, which is the first speech therapy application for hearing-impaired children in Myanmar. This mobile application uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based offline Burmese speech recognition system. It can help hearing-impaired children to train with the language pre-requisites at their own pace. To effectively help the hearing-impaired children to understand the basics of the language, this system provides one-syllable and two-syllable structured Myanmar words collected in real-life educational and communication materials. The experimental result shows that the prediction rate of this system is nearly 60%. Experiments also show the hearing-impaired children can learn and operate the language freely through a simple practice using this application. The expectation is that this application can bring both opportunities and life-quality improvements for children with hearing loss in Myanmar.