Challenges in Adopting Speech Control for Assistive Robots

This paper presents a pragmatic report about experiences gathered with the speech command interface of HOBBIT, a mobile assistive robot intended to support older persons in their private home. An outline of the associated problems and challenges in distant speech recognition is given. Far field detection of user’s voice commands is necessary due to user acceptance considerations. A commercially available automatic speech recognition (ASR) serves as base. Measurements of directivity of several microphones were done and ASR performance with a small vocabulary showed low word error rates (WER) in different acoustic environments: anechoic room (0 %), free space (2.6 %), AAL room (3.8 %) when using a small array microphone with beam forming. Further explorative trials in a free space setting with a second (disturbing) signal source resulted in a WER of 3.9 % (two voices) and 11.1 % (one voice and radio news) compared to 2.6 % in case of only one speaker.

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