Question: Will the authors' work help with speech restoration for people who can not speak at all?
Evidence: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non invasive way of measuring electrical activity of human brain. In BIBREF0 we demonstrated deep learning based automatic speech recognition (ASR) using EEG signals for a limited English vocabulary of four words and five vowels. In this paper we extend our work for a much larger English vocabulary and we use state-of-art end-to-end continuous speech recognition models to perform recognition. In our prior work we predicted isolated words and vowels.
ASR systems forms the front end or back end in many cutting edge voice activated technologies like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Windows Cortana, Samsung Bixby etc. Unfortunately these systems are trained to recognize text only from acoustic features. This limits technology accessibility to people with speaking disabilities and disorders. The research work presented in this paper tries to address this issue by investigating speech recognition using only EEG signals with no acoustic input and also by combining EEG features along with traditional acoustic features to perform recognition. We believe the former will help with speech restoration for people who can not speak at all and the latter will help people who are having speaking disabilities like broken or discontinued speech etc to use voice activated technologies with better user experience there by helping in improving technology accessibility.
ASR performance is degraded in presence of noisy speech and in real life situations most of the speech is noisy. Inspired from the unique robustness to environmental artifacts exhibited by the human auditory cortex BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 we used very noisy speech data for this work and demonstrated lower word error rate (WER) for smaller corpus using EEG features, concatenation of EEG features and acoustic features.
In BIBREF3 authors decode imagined speech from EEG using synthetic EEG data and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) network but in our work we use real EEG data, use EEG data recorded along with acoustics. In BIBREF4 authors perform envisioned speech recognition using random forest classifier but in our case we use end to end state of art models and perform recognition for noisy speech. In BIBREF5 authors demonstrate speech recognition using electrocorticography (ECoG) signals, which are invasive in nature but in our work we use non invasive EEG signals.
This work is mainly motivated by the results explained in BIBREF0 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF3 . In BIBREF6 the authors used classification approach for identifying phonological categories in imagined and silent speech but in our work we used continuous speech recognition state of art models and our models were predicting words, characters at each time step. Similarly in BIBREF7 neural network based classification approach was used for predicting phonemes.
Major contribution of this paper is the demonstration of end to end continuous noisy speech recognition using only EEG features and this paper further validates the concepts introduced in BIBREF0 for a much larger English corpus.
We believe the former will help with speech restoration for people who can not speak at all and the latter will help people who are having speaking disabilities like broken or discontinued speech etc to use voice activated technologies with better user experience there by helping in improving technology accessibility.
Answer: Yes, it will.