PEAKS – A system for the automatic evaluation of voice and speech disorders

We present a novel system for the automatic evaluation of speech and voice disorders. The system can be accessed via the internet platform-independently. The patient reads a text or names pictures. His or her speech is then analyzed by automatic speech recognition and prosodic analysis. For patients who had their larynx removed due to cancer and for children with cleft lip and palate we show that we can achieve significant correlations between the automatic analysis and the judgment of human experts in a leave-one-out experiment (p < .001). A correlation of .90 for the evaluation of the laryngectomees and .87 for the evaluation of the children’s data was obtained. This is comparable to human inter-rater correlations.