A voice-controlled serious game for the sustained vowel exercise

Abstract

Speech is the main form of human communication. Thus it is important to detect and treat speech sound disorders as early as possible during childhood. When children need to attend speech therapy it is critical to keep them motivated on doing the therapy exercises. Software systems for speech therapy can be a useful tool to keep the child interested in keep practicing the therapy exercises. Several software systems have been developed to assist speech and language therapists during the therapy sessions. However most software focus on articulation disorders while voice disorders have been mostly neglected. Here we propose a voice-controlled serious computer game for the sustained vowel exercise, which is an exercise commonly used in speech therapy to treat voice disorders. The main novelty of this application is the combination of real time speech processing, with the gamification of the speech therapy exercises and the parameterization of the difficulty level.