Automated System for Subjective Evaluation of the Ukrainian Speech Intelligibility

Abstract

In this paper, a prototype of an automated system for subjective evaluation of intelligibility of the Ukrainian speech in communication channels is proposed. The structure of this system includes nine articulation tables of speech monosyllables of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) type and a set of computer programs that allow automating most of the stages of articulation test. Examination of the proposed automated system proved its efficiency and satisfactory consistency with literature data. At the same time, when testing the developed software, several interesting phenomena were discovered. First, when listening, by some people, to noisy and reverberated signals in rooms through acoustic monitors, speech intelligibility turned out to be abnormally high, reaching 80-94% for a signal-to-noise ratio of minus 10 dB and a reverberation time of 2.7 seconds. Secondly, the masking properties of white noise were more pronounced for small signal-to-noise ratios, rather than what was predicted in some literary sources. Nevertheless, the developed software as a whole can be considered as suitable for communication channels acoustic testing. After certain upgrade, the system can be used for acoustic examination of rooms too.