High quality speech for laryngectomized persons
Harina Kapoor · ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society · 1990
Each year throat cancer causes a large number of individuals to undergo a partial OI total laryngectomy resulting in the loss of normal speech.Many of these individuals utilize the ElectrolarynxTM, a battery-operated, hand-held device which, when held to the throat, creates sufficient turbulence to allow the user to produce low quality speech.This paper details the techniques that we use to recognize the speech output produced by laryngectomized persons using a modified Electrolarynx and synthesize high qualit speech using a miniaturized version of DECTALK J M. Our goal is to develop a Portable Real Time Speech System that can be attached to the user's belt which will allow laryngectomized persons to produce high quality speech in real time.The hardware will include a 22 MIPS IX3000 RISC microprocessor, and a TMS 32OC30 digital signal processing chip.