  This paper introduces a new dysarthric speech command dataset in Italian,
called EasyCall corpus. The dataset consists of 21386 audio recordings from 24
healthy and 31 dysarthric speakers, whose individual degree of speech
impairment was assessed by neurologists through the Therapy Outcome Measure.
The corpus aims at providing a resource for the development of ASR-based
assistive technologies for patients with dysarthria. In particular, it may be
exploited to develop a voice-controlled contact application for commercial
smartphones, aiming at improving dysarthric patients' ability to communicate
with their family and caregivers. Before recording the dataset, participants
were administered a survey to evaluate which commands are more likely to be
employed by dysarthric individuals in a voice-controlled contact application.
In addition, the dataset includes a list of non-commands (i.e., words
near/inside commands or phonetically close to commands) that can be leveraged
to build a more robust command recognition system. At present commercial ASR
systems perform poorly on the EasyCall Corpus as we report in this paper. This
result corroborates the need for dysarthric speech corpora for developing
effective assistive technologies. To the best of our knowledge, this database
represents the richest corpus of dysarthric speech to date.
