Design of Anti-Stuttering Device with Silence Ejection Speech algorithm using Arduino

Abstract

Stuttering is disorder of speech which is characterized by the reiteration of sounds, syllables or disputes. This disorder affects the normal flow of speech accompanied by struggle behaviors. Stuttering disorder affects the mental ability of the people as it creates difficulty to communicate with other people and to maintain their interpersonal relationships. The negative influence during job interviews questions their talent and skill sets. More than 70 million people stutter which covers 1% of world's population. Though stuttering is found common during childhood, some has a prolonged stuttering for many years. Public speaking is still a big question to the people to stutter. The idea of the proposed paper is to design an Arduino based anti-Stuttering device with the help of Silence ejection speech algorithm. To remove the long gaps and to make an input shuttered signal as an un-shuttered signal, three software platforms are interconnected. AUDACITY, MATLAB and PYTHON are correlated to each other to retain the perfect flow of the proposed algorithm. AUDACITY is an open source digital audio editor and recording platform which helps to store the input shuttered signal. The stored shuttered signal is feed to MATLAB to perform magnitude filtering. The magnitude filtered output is then silence ejected. The magnitude filtration process is concerned with three set of values. The compared best value is then fed for silence ejection. The silence ejected output is converted from speech to text. This conversion helps to remove the repeated words in the silence ejected signal with reduced time. The final repetition removed text is fed to the Arduino board to convert the text to speech. The converted un-shuttered signal is given as input to the speaker from Arduino. This process of converting the shuttered speech signal to un-shuttered signal will help people who suffer from shuttering and stammering to have a balance psychological effects.