Improving the accuracy of automated cleft speech evaluation.

An automated cleft speech evaluator, available globally, has the potential to dramatically improve quality of life for children born with a cleft palate, as well as eliminating bias for outcome collaboration between cleft centers in the developed world. Our automated cleft speech evaluator interprets resonance and articulatory cleft speech errors to distinguish between normal speech, velopharyngeal dysfunction and articulatory speech errors. This article describes a significant update in the efficiency of our evaluator.

Automated cleft speech evaluation using speech recognition.

Perceptual evaluation remains the gold-standard evaluation of cleft speech, but with any human interpretation, there can be bias. Eliminating bias, allowing comparison of speech data between units, is labor and time intensive. Globally, there is a shortage of listeners.