Designing robust multimodal systems for universal access
WUAUC'01 Proceedings of the 2001 EC/NSF workshop on Universal accessibility of ubiquitous computing: providing for the elderly
AMT '01 Proceedings of the 6th International Computer Science Conference on Active Media Technology
Toward adaptive conversational interfaces: Modeling speech convergence with animated personas
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Audio-visual cues distinguishing self- from system-directed speech in younger and older adults
ICMI '05 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
Automatic speech recognition and speech variability: A review
Speech Communication
Acoustic variability and automatic recognition of children's speech
Speech Communication
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Towards age-independent acoustic modeling
Speech Communication
Speech Input from Older Users in Smart Environments: Challenges and Perspectives
UAHCI '09 Proceedings of the 5th International on ConferenceUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Part II: Intelligent and Ubiquitous Interaction Environments
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing - Special issue on atypical speech
A review of ASR technologies for children's speech
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction
Improved automatic speech recognition through speaker normalization
Computer Speech and Language
Ambient intelligence and multimodality
UAHCI'07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Universal access in human-computer interaction: ambient interaction
Ageing voices: the effect of changes in voice parameters on ASR performance
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing - Special issue on atypical speech
On the impact of children's emotional speech on acoustic and language models
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing - Special issue on atypical speech
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing - Special issue on atypical speech
Age and gender detection in the I-DASH project
ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing (TSLP)
International Journal of Speech Technology
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Although children and the elderly have obvious needs for voice operated interfaces, hardly anything is known about the performance of the current automatic speech recognition technology with these people. In this paper we report the results of a thorough investigation into this field using a connected digit recognizer and a major telephone speech database. One would generally assume that the recognition of speech from these people would only be a matter of having enough, sufficiently representative training data. This turns out to be true only, as long as the speakers belong to the age range 15 to approximately 70. Outside this range the error rates increase dramatically, even with balanced amounts of training data. For males, the lower limit is very sharp and can be attributed to the change of pitch frequency during puberty. For females, the lower limit is gradual and caused by the slowly changing dimensions of the vocal tract length only. For both genders, the upper limit is very gradual and can possibly be attributed to changes in the glottis area and the internal control loops of the human articulatory system. The paper presents some supporting evidence for the above assertions and gives results for various attempts to improve the performance. Recognition of children and the elderly will require much more research if we are to fully understand the characteristics of these age group on current and future speech recognition systems.