Longitudinal study of ASR performance on ageing voices

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study of ASR performance on ageing voices. Experiments were conducted on the audio recordings of the proceedings of the Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS). Results show that the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Word Error Rates (WERs) for elderly voices are significantly higher than those of adult voices. The word error rate increases gradually as the age of the elderly speakers increase. Use of maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) based speaker adaptation on ageing voices improves the WER though the performance is still considerably lower compared to adult voices. Speaker adaptation however reduces the increase in WER with age during old age.