Speech recognition of aged voice in the AAL context: Detection of distress sentences

By 2050, about a third of the French population will be over 65. In the context of technologies development aiming at helping aged people to live independently at home, the CIRDO project aims at implementing an ASR system into a social inclusion product designed for elderly people in order to detect distress situations. Speech recognition systems present higher word error rate when speech is uttered by elderly speakers compared to when non-aged voice is considered. Two specialized corpora in French, AD80 and ERES38, were recorded in this framework by aged people, they were used first to study the possibility of adaptation of standard ASR to aged voice. Then we looked at whether the variability of the WER between speakers could be correlated with the level of dependence. Then, we assessed the performance of distress sentence detection by a filter and we demonstrated a significant drop in performance for those with the lowest degree of autonomy.