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Investigating Speech Reconstruction for Laryngectomees for Silent Speech Interfaces

Silent speech interfaces (SSIs) are devices that convert non-audio bio-signals to speech, which hold the potential of recovering quality speech for laryngectomees (people who have undergone laryngectomy). Although signiﬁcant progress has been made, most of the recent SSI works focused on data collected from healthy speakers. SSIs for laryngectomees have rarely been investigated. In this study, we investigated the reconstruction of speech for two laryngectomees who either use tra-cheoesophageal puncture (TEP) or electro-larynx (EL) speech as their post-surgery communication mode. We reconstructed their speech using two SSI designs (1) real-time recognition-and-synthesis and (2) directly articulation-to-speech synthesis (ATS). The reconstructed speech samples were measured in subjective evaluation by 20 listeners in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. The results indicated that both designs increased the naturalness of alaryngeal speech. The real-time recognition-and-synthesis design obtained higher intelligibility in electro-larynx speech as well, while the ATS did not. These prelimi-nary results suggest the real-time recognition-and-synthesis design may have a better potential for clinical applications (for laryngectomees) than ATS.